Søren Galatius receives award from the association AMR
The Association for Mathematical Research (AMR) has July 1st 2024 awarded Professor Søren Galatius from University of Copenhagen the new Fred R. Cohen Prize.
The prize recognizes outstanding contributions in the area of algebraic topology from the last ten years. The Association for Mathematical Research says in their announcement:
“Søren Galatius is one of the outstanding mathematicians of his generation and has contributed greatly to the development of algebraic topology. This includes new proofs of the Mumford conjecture on the cohomology of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and a proof of the Hatcher-Vogtmann conjecture on the cohomology of the automorphism groups of free groups. Most significantly his breakthrough work with Oscar Randal-Williams on our understanding of high dimensional manifolds and their automorphisms constitute some of the most outstanding contributions to the area over the last 30 years and open up a whole new approach to the algebraic topology of manifolds.”
“Congratulations to Søren on the first Fred R. Cohen Prize. The awarding of this prize is an underlining and recognition of Søren’s pioneering contributions to algebraic topology,” says Head of Department Mogens Steffensen, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen.
Søren Galatius was born in Randers, Denmark. He earned his PhD from Aarhus University in 2004 under the supervision of Ib Madsen. He then joined the Stanford University faculty, first with a temporary position as a Szegő Assistant Professor and then two years later with a tenure-track position, eventually becoming a full professor in 2011. He relocated to the University of Copenhagen in 2016. He is one of the founders and core members of the Copenhagen Centre for Geometry and Topology.
Galatius has received several prestigious grants and awards, including a Clay Research Fellowship (2007-2010). He received a silver medal from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2010. In 2017, he won an Elite Research Prize from the Danish Government for his work. He is Vice President of the Danish Committee for Mathematics. In 2022 he received the Clay Research Award with Randal-Williams.
This prize honours the work of Fred R. Cohen who was one of the leading homotopy theorists and algebraic topologists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. “His work was extraordinarily broad, and his contributions to the study of homotopy groups and configuration spaces were striking advances which moved the whole field forward. His work combined hard computations with strong theoretical contributions in a way which is very rare to see,” says AMR.