Rice mathematicians Christos Mantoulidis and Nets Katz have received Frontiers of Science Awards in mathematics at the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) in Beijing.
Announced at the opening of the international scientific meeting July 14, the awards aim to encourage research at the frontiers of mathematics, theoretical physics and theoretical computer and information sciences by honoring high-impact achievements from the previous decade.
Katz, a Texas native who earned his bachelor’s degree from Rice in 1990, joined Rice’s faculty in 2023 as the W.L. Moody Professor of Mathematics following a 10-year stint as the IBM Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.
Katz and University of British Columbia’s Joshua Zahl were honored by ICBS for co-authoring a 2019 paper in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society titled “An improved bound on the Hausdorff dimension of Besicovitch sets in R3.”
Mantoulidis earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University and joined Rice’s Department of Mathematics as an assistant professor in 2021 following appointments at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ICBS honored Mantoulidis and Stanford University’s Otis Chodosh as co-authors of a 2020 paper in the Annals of Mathematics titled, “Minimal surfaces and the Allen-Cahn equation on 3-manifolds: index, multiplicity, and curvature estimates.”
In 2023, Rice mathematician David Fisher shared an ICBS Frontiers of Science Award with co-authors Aaron Brown and Sebastian Hurtado for a 2022 paper in the Annals of Mathematics that he-co-authored in with Aaron Brown and Sebastian Hurtado titled, “Zimmer's conjecture: Subexponential growth, measure rigidity, and strong property (T).”