2008 Clay Research Fellows Announced

The Clay Mathematics Institute announces the selection of its 2008 Research Fellows:

Spyros Alexakis (Princeton University)
Adrian Ioana (Caltech)
Xinyi Yuan (Columbia University)

Spyros Alexakis received his Ph.D from Princeton University under the supervision of Charles Fefferman in 2005. In his thesis, he proved a special case of the Desser-Schwimmer conjecture in conformal geometry. More recently he proved the full case. This conjecture characterizes all pointwise Riemannian invariant polynomials in the metric tensor and its derivatives whose integrals over a compact manifold without boundary are invariant under conformal deformations.

Adrian Ioana received his Ph.D degree in 2007 from UCLA under the direction of Sorin Popa. He is currently a postdoc at Caltech. Ioana is the author of five papers submitted or published. In his 2006 paper, he showed that any group that contains a copy of the free group on two letters has uncountably many orbit inequivalent actions.

Xinyi Yuan will receive his Ph.D degree in 2008 from Columbia University under the direction of Shou-Wu Zhang. In his 2006 preprint, "Big Line Bundles over Arithmetic Varieties," he proves an arithmetic analogue of a theorem of Siu and derives, among other consequences, a natural sufficient condition for when the orbit under the absolute Galois group is equidistributed.

Clay Research Fellows, who are appointed for terms ranging from two to five years, receive a generous twelve-month salary and benefits, as well as flexible research support (travel, travel for collaborators, books, equipment, etc.). Nominees are considered each year in January. Eligible are graduating Ph.D's and mathematicians be within three years of their Ph.D.

Current Clay Research Fellows are Mohammed Abouzaid, Artur Avila, Maria Chudnovsky, Soren Galatius, Bo'az Klartag, Ciprian Manolescu, Davesh Maulik, Maryam Mirzakhani, Sophie Morel, Sam Payne, David Speyer, Teruyoshi Yoshida.

Past Clay Research Fellows are Roman Bezrukavnikov, Manjul Bhargava, Daniel Biss, Alexei Borodin, Dennis Gaitsgory, Daniel Gottesman, Ben Green, Sergei Gukov, Elon Lindenstrauss, Mircea Mustata, Igor Rodnianski, Terence Tao, András Vasy, Akshay Venkatesh.