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Mathematician honored for major contributions to algebraic geometry

February 08, 2016

James McKernan, professor of mathematics, will share the 2016 E.H. Moore Research Article Prize given by the American Mathematical Society for work cited as a "watershed" in algebraic geometry, a branch of mathematics that investigates connections between numbers and shapes. With a pair of papers published in the Journal of the AMS in 2010, McKernan and co-authors Caucher Birkar of the University of Cambridge, Paolo Cascini of Imperial College London, and Christopher Hacon of the University of Utah made a major stride in advancing the "minimal model program," which seeks a way of classifying algebraic varieties by finding representations that are in some sense the simplest.