Courant’s Assaf Naor Wins 2008 Salem Prize

      Assaf Naor, an associate professor in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been awarded the 2008 Salem Prize for his contributions to the structural theory of metric spaces and their applications to computer science.
      The prize was established by the widow of Raphael Salem in 1968 and is awarded to young mathematicians judged to have done outstanding work in Salem’s field of interest—the theory of the Fourier series, an infinite series used to solve differential equations. Boaz Klartag, an associate professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel-Aviv University, also received the Salem Prize this year. Akshay Venkatesh, an associate professor at Courant, won the Salem Prize in 2007.
      Naor, 33, works primarily in the area of metric spaces, which are abstract mathematical “universes” in which one can quantitatively measure the distance between any two points. For example, in an Internet search, the metric spaces constitute the distance between any two Web sites, or the minimum number of clicks required to pass from one site to another.
      Naor previously worked at Microsoft Research and has been at Courant since 2006. In 2008, he won a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, one of 20 scientific researchers to receive the honor, which includes an unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years. He also received a 2008 European Mathematical Society (EMS) Prize, which is given every four years at the European Congresses of Mathematics. Naor and his Courant colleague Subhash Khot are part of a multi-institutional team that was awarded a $10 million National Science Foundation grant last summer.