News

Professor Shamir is best known for his invention, with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman, of the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public-key encryption and digital signature schemes in 1977.

In research, Professor Schellenberg was very successful, publishing about 40 scholarly papers. In teaching, he was also very successful; his file is filled with glowing testimonials from chairs and associate deans. But it was in service - to the department, faculty and university - that he was really remarkable.

For more than thirty years, Arkadi Nemirovski has been a leader in continuous optimization. He has played central roles in three of the major breakthroughs in optimization, namely, the ellipsoid method for convex optimization, the extension of modern interior-point methods to convex optimization, and the development of robust optimization.

Professor Paul Seymour received an honorary Doctor of Mathematics (DMath) at the University of Waterloo's Fall Convocation.

The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 118 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Richard Stanley is the world's leader in algebraic and enumerative combinatorics. He has written over 140 scientific papers, with more than 40 co-authors, and has supervised 44 PhD students. His two volume book "Enumerative Combinatorics" (1986 and 1999) is the definitive work on the subject, and has had an immense influence on today's combinatorialists.

Dominic Welsh is a leading contributor to combinatorial mathematics in several ways. In research, his significant contributions began with his doctoral thesis, "On stochastic processes, with special reference to percolation theory". This was a basis for much further work, including the Russo-Seymour-Welsh theorem.

Professor Penny E. Haxell works in combinatorics and graph theory, focussing on combinatorial, probabilistic and, more recently, topological tools in a very fascinating manner. In all her work she exhibits impressive capability, originality and technical ability, and her pioneering work is well known internationally.

Her work in 1995 with Kohayakawa and Luczak, led to a profound study of Szemeredi's lemma in a sparse setting, and their methods are still being developed fruitfully by others.