Kontsevich awarded Shaw Prize in the Mathematical Sciences

Maxim Kontsevich, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the Shaw Prize in the Mathematical Sciences, an international award to honor excellence in the field. Kontsevich was selected "for his pioneering works in algebra, geometry and mathematical physics and in particular, deformation quantization, motivic integration and mirror symmetry."

Kontsevich is one of the most celebrated and influential mathematicians of the modern era. He has been awarded some of the most prestigious honors in mathematics, including the Henri Poincaré Prize in 1997, the Fields medal in 1998, and the Crafoord Prize in 2008. Kontsevich is a permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France.

"There are, in my opinion, six major international mathematics prizes: Abel, Crafoord, Fields, Schock, Shaw and Wolf," said Professor Alan Zame, former chair of the Department of Mathematics. "There are seven active mathematicians who have won three of them … Max is by far the youngest."