Fields Notes 18.1 | Page 11

SPOTLIGHT TOBIAS COLDING COXETER LECTURE SERIES SPEAKER MESSOUD EFENDIYEV DEAN'S DISTINGUISHED VISITING PROFESSOR JEREMY QUASTEL 2018 CRM-FIELDS-PIMS PRIZE WINNER Professor Colding (MIT) is a distinguished mathematician who has won major awards for his research contributions, notably the Veblen Prize of the American Mathematical Society, the Cecil and Ida B. Green Distinguished Professorship of Mathematics, and the Carlsberg Foundation Research Prize for ground‑breaking research in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He has also twice been a Clay Senior Scholar and a Simons investigator. His three lectures covered: geometric heat equations, level set method for motion by mean curvature, and optimal regularity for geometric flows. All lectures were very well-attended and highly informative. Each year, a leading international researcher in the mathematical sciences is invited to give a full term graduate course. This year Professor Messoud Efendiyev (Helmholtz Zentrum München) served as the Dean's Distinguished Visiting Professor from January to June. His course was titled Infinite Dimensional Dynamical Systems and their Applications in Mathematical Biology. Evolution equations arising in the modelling of life science problems is a fascinating subject area. It is at the heart of understanding many important problems arising in biology, medicine, ecology, physics and mechanics. The goal of this course was to convince and show the audience the important role of applying mathematics to real world situations and explain experimental findings. The winner of this year's CRM‑Fields-PIMS Prize is Professor Jeremy Quastel (University of Toronto). Jeremy Quastel is generally regarded as one of the best probabilists in the world because of the major breakthroughs he has made in hydrodynamic theory, the theory of stochastic partial differential equations and the probabilistic aspects of integrable systems. He proved a 25-year‑old conjecture from physics about the scaling exponents for the KPZ equation, and also computed an exact formula for its one-point distribution. Jeremy Quastel obtained his PhD from the Courant Institute in 1990. After six years at the University of California, Davis, he became a professor at the University of Toronto in 1998. 11