Mikhail Gromov, the Jay Gould Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been elected as a foreign member to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.

Courant’s Gromov Elected to Royal Society
Mikhail Gromov, the Jay Gould Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been elected as a foreign member to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.

Mikhail Gromov, the Jay Gould Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been elected as a foreign member to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.

“Mikhail Gromov ranks among the most deeply original mathematicians of our time,” the London-based Society said in announcing Gromov’s election. “His remarkable insight and unorthodox viewpoints have redefined whole areas of mathematics, most notably the subject of geometric group theory.”

Gromov has been recognized as a founder of the field of global symplectic geometry, an outgrowth of classical Hamiltonian mechanics, which describes the motion of particles. Symplectic geometry has application to many areas, including mathematical physics, dynamical systems, and low-dimensional topology, with the potential for discovering and understanding new conserved quantities, such as energy or momentum, that don’t change as a system evolves over time.

Gromov, who also has an appointment at France’s Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, was awarded the 2009 Abel Prize in Mathematics by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His other distinguished international awards include the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences (2002), the Balzan Prize (1999), the Leroy P. Steele Prize (1997), the Lobatchewski Medal (1997), and the Wolf Prize (1993). He is also a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as a member of l’Académie française de Sciences.

The Royal Society’s fellows and foreign members have included Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Stephen Hawking. There are approximately 1,500 Fellows and Foreign Members, including more than 70 Nobel Laureates.

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