Second Stephen Smale Prize

The second Stephen Smale Prize will be awarded at the FoCM'14 meeting in Montevideo on December 13th, 2014 to

Carlos Beltrán and Mark Braverman

The winners received a "Gömböc" as the prize. More about the Gömböc is here.

About the prize winners

Professor Carlos Beltrán, University of Cantabria, is one of the two recipients of the Smale Prize 2014 for his brilliant contributions to fundamental problems in the foundations of computational mathematics. Beltrán’s work embodies original approaches that combine the use of complex geometric structure and analytic power to make important progress on problems which have been the focus of intense research efforts by others. An important part of his work has been devoted to polynomial system solving, producing with Luis M. Pardo a Las Vegas algorithm for Smale's 17th problem, and studying the underlying geometry with Mike Shub and others. His work on producing equidistributed points on the sphere defines the state of the art on Smale's 7th problem. With Anton Leykin he has provided tools to adapt numerical methods to supply proofs in algebraic geometry. In addition, his work with Oscar González and Ignacio Santamaría on interference alignment (solving a problem in information theory, open for more than 10 years) is also a milestone.

Professor Mark Braverman, Princeton University, is one of the two recipients of the Smale Prize 2014 for his pioneering work on the foundations of computational mathematics. Braverman has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of computability and complexity questions involving both continuous and discrete systems. In particular, his joint work with Michael Yampolsky showed how to apply deep and modern techniques of complex analysis and dynamics to classify Julia sets according to their computability and complexity. Concerning discrete problems, in a series of papers Braverman and his collaborators have shown how to apply Shannon's information theory to settle central open questions in communication complexity, including proving lower bounds on the ability of linear programs to approximate NP complete problems. He also developed surprising techniques from harmonic analysis to finally prove the Linial-Nisan Conjecture, and disproved, with collaborators, an old conjecture of Krivine.

Smale Prize 2014 committee