Prof. Stevo Todorcevic awarded CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize

PIMS is delighted to announce that Stevo Todorcevic (University of Toronto) is the winner of the 2012 CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize. Professor Todorcevic obtained his Ph.D. in 1979 in Belgrade and currently holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto.

The CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize is the premier Canadian award for research achievements in the mathematical sciences. The prize winner is selected each fall by an independent international committee with six members, two named by each of the three institutes. The prize winner is invited to give a lecture at each of the institutes and the prize includes a cash award of $10,000. PIMS at UBC will be pleased to present this lecture on April 4, 2012.

Professor Todorcevic’s contributions to set theory have made him a world leader in this topic with a particular impact on combinatorial set theory and its connections with topology and analysis.

His work is recognized for its striking originality and technical brilliance. He was an invited speaker at the 1998 ICM in Berlin for his work on rho-functions. He made major contributions to the study of S- and L- spaces in topology, proved a remarkable classification theorem for transitive relations on the first uncountable ordinal, made a deep study of compact subsets of the Baire class 1 functions thus continuing work of Bourgain, Fremlin, Talagrand, and others in Banach space theory. Together with P. Larson he completed the solution of Katetov's old compact spaces metrization problem. Among the most striking recent accomplishments of Todorcevic (and co-authors) are major contributions to the von Neumann and Maharam problems on Boolean algebras, the theory of non-separable Banach spaces, including the solution of an old problem of Davis and Johnson, the solution of a long standing problem of Laver, and the development of a duality theory relating finite Ramsey theory and topological dynamics.