Department of Mathematics professors selected to present at the International Congress of Mathematicians Two professors from the University of Utah’s Department of Mathematics have
received invitations to present at the prestigious International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in July 2022, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The invitations are an indication of the importance of the work these professors are engaged in and of the caliber of the department. First held in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1897, the ICM is the largest and most significant conference on pure and applied mathematics, as well as one of the world’s oldest scientific congresses. ICMs are run every four years by the International Mathematical Union in partnership with host country organizers.
Mladen Bestvina will give a plenary lecture Mladen Bestvina, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, has been invited to give a plenary lecture. Plenary lectures are given in the part of the conference that everyone attends. An invitation to give a plenary lecture to the thousands of ICM participants is considered a special distinction in the mathematics field, and criteria for selection are rigorous. This is the second time Bestvina has been invited to speak at the ICM. He was a speaker in the topology section in 2002 in Beijing.
Mladen Bestvina
“It is a huge honor for me to be selected to give a plenary talk at the ICM,” said Bestvina. “It’s primarily a recognition of the big advances my field—geometric group theory—has made over the last several decades. When I started my career, the term didn’t even exist, and now geometric group theory has developed into a field involving topology, geometry, and dynamics. In my own work, I always found it more rewarding and satisfying to collaborate with others. Over the years I wrote papers with many collaborators, but I’d like to mention three with whom I wrote quite a few papers and who deserve a lot of credit for my invitation to speak at the ICM: Professor Ken Bromberg, who teaches in our Math Department; Mark Feighn, Professor of mathematics and computer science at Rutgers University; and Koji Fujiwara, a math professor at Kyoto University in Japan.”
Bestvina’s research Bestvina’s research focuses on symmetries of objects (called “groups” in mathematics) from the point of view of geometry and topology. For example: imagine an infinite chess board—the plane with the usual tiling into squares (ignore the colors of the squares that a chess board would have). What is the group of symmetries? An example of a symmetry is a translation of the entire board by a whole number of squares in the direction of a side of a square. In the language of geometric group theory, this group is “virtually Z+Z.”
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