Professor Emeritus David Mumford receives two major international honors
Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics David Mumford is this year’s recipient of the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics, awarded by the Israeli government in recognition of his groundbreaking theoretical work in algebraic geometry. After receiving the award from Israeli President Shimon Peres on May 25 in Israel, Mumford announced the next day that he was donating half of his share of the prize money to an Israeli human-rights organization that protects the educational rights of Palestinian students, and the other half to Birzeit University in the West Bank.
In addition, Mumford has been elected to the Royal Society of London, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences. Forty-four fellows were elected on May 16, and Mumford is one of only eight foreign members who were honored. According to Professor of Engineering Peter Richardson, who became a fellow in 1986, the Royal Society was founded in 1660, making it the oldest scientific society in the world in continuous existence. Newton was an early fellow, and each year 44 new fellows are elected, together with an honorary fellow and a small number of foreign members.
Mumford is one of Brown’s most celebrated scholars. He received the Fields Medal from the International Mathematics Union in 1974 for his fundamental contributions to algebraic geometry, notably his creation of geometric invariant theory, revitalizing a classical subject. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975.
Mumford won the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences in 2006 and the Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2007. He is a MacArthur “genius” grant winner and served as president of the International Mathematical Union from 1995 to 1999. His work on moduli spaces has recently found unexpected applications in theoretical physics. In the early 1980s, Mumford switched his attention to understanding vision as a computational problem and helped develop the celebrated “Mumford-Shah functional” in the theory of image segmentation.