2015 UBC-PIMS Mathematical Sciences Faculty Award: Rachel Ollivier

The winner of the 2015 UBC Mathematics and Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Faculty Award is Professor Rachel Ollivier (Department of Mathematics, UBC). This prize was created by two founding donors, Anton Kuipers and Darrell Duffie, to recognize UBC researchers for their leading edge work in mathematics or its applications in the sciences.

Professor Ollivier works in the Langlands Programme, a central theme in pure mathematics which predicts deep connections between number theory and representation theory. She has made profound contributions in the new branches of the "p-adic" and "mod-p" Langlands correspondence that emerged from Fontaine's work on studying the p-adic Galois representation, and is one of the pioneers shaping this new field. The first results on the mod-p Langlands correspondence were limited to the group GL₂(Q_p); but Dr. Ollivier has proved that this is the only group for which this holds, a surprising result which has motivated much subsequent research.

She has also made important and technically challenging contributions in the area of representation theory of p-adic groups, in particular, in the study of the Iwahori-Hecke algebra. In joint work with P. Schneider, Professor Ollivier used methods of Bruhat-Tits theory to make substantial progress in understanding these algebras. She has obtained deep results of algebraic nature, recently defining a new invariant that may shed light on the special properties of the group GL₂(Q_p)

Rachel Ollivier received her PhD from University Paris Diderot (Paris 7), and then held a research position at ENS Paris. She subsequently was an Assistant Professor at the University of Versailles and then Columbia University, before joining the faculty of UBC in 2013.