Courant’s Naor Wins Packard Fellowship

Assaf Naor, an associate professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been named recipient of a 2008 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. Naor was one of 20 scientific researchers to receive the fellowship, which includes an unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years.
    Naor, who was previously a researcher at Microsoft Research and who has been at Courant since 2006, has done extensive work in geometry. Under the Packard Fellowship, he will continue his work on metric spaces, which are abstract mathematical “universes” in which one can quantitatively measure the distance between any two points. The familiar three-dimensional world in which we live is a good example, though the notion of a metric space encompasses much more complicated and higher dimensional geometries.
    Naor is also part of a team that received an NSF grant. See page 6.
    —James Devitt