People: NSF Presents $500,000 Waterman Award To Courant Institute Mathematician, British Oceanographer Nets Woods Hole's Stommel Medal; Obituary

Mathematician John Swallow, British Oceanographer Nets Woods Hole's Stommel Medal Paul R. Feyerabend -- Obituary AUTHOR: CRAIG MONTESANO, pp. 23 DATE: May 16, 1994 Mathematician Gang Tian, a professor of mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (NYU), is the recipient of the 1994 Alan T. Waterman Award, presented by the National Science Foundation and the National Science Board (NSB) to an outstanding researcher, 35 years of age or younger, in any field of science or engineering supported by NSF. The prize consists of a citation, a bronze medal, and a grant of $500,000 over a three-year period for scientific research or advanced study at the institution of the recipient's choice. Award ceremonies were held at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on May 4. Widely regarded as one of the world's leading young experts in differential geometry, Tian, 35, is known for his mastery of nonlinear partial differential equations as well as complex and algebraic geometry. His major research accomplishments include the solution of the problem of the existence of Kahler-Einstein metrics on complex surfaces, proof that moduli space for Kahler- Einstein metrics with zero first-class Chern class is nonsingular, and proof of the stability of algebraic manifolds by using Kahler-Einstein metrics. Tian says he will apply the award money toward continued research at the Courant Institute. In addition, he says, he hopes to pursue other mathematical vistas. "I will not confine myself to complex differential geometry," he says. "I would like to study the relation of geometry to physics." Tian has served on the faculty of the Courant Institute since 1992. Previously, he was an associate professor of mathematics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, from 1990 to 1991, and an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University from 1988 to 1990. A citizen of the People's Republic of China, Tian received a B.S. from Nanking University in 1982, an M.S. from Beijing University in 1984, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1988. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in 1987 and was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1991 to 1993. The Waterman Award was established by Congress in 1975 to mark the 25th anniversary of NSF and to honor Alan T. Waterman, the agency's first director, whose tenure spanned the administrations of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. John C. Swallow, British oceanographer and inventor of the neutrally buoyant float for use in tracking elements of the ocean's general circulation, has been selected as the first recipient of the Henry Stommel Medal in Oceanography from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Established in January 1993 in honor of longtime WHOI oceanographer Henry Melson Stommel, the award recognizes "fundamental and enduring contributions to observing and understanding ocean processes." Stommel, who died in 1991 at the age of 71, conducted physical oceanography research that led to the development of modern concepts in ocean circulation. Swallow, 70, was a member of the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (formerly the National Institute of Oceanography) at Deacon Laboratory, Wormley, U.K., from 1954 until his retirement in 1983. At Cambridge University in the 1940s, Swallow began work on techniques for seismic prospecting at sea, applying them in a round-the-world voyage from 1950 to 1952 aboard HMS Challenger. He received a Ph.D. with first-class honors in physics in 1954. Swallow made numerous research voyages with various ships, many in collaboration with Henry Stommel. Among the more productive of their cooperative efforts was the MEDOC experiment in 1969, an investigation into winter convective processes in the northwest Mediterranean Sea. Stommel and Swallow also shared an interest in the western boundary and equatorial currents of the Indian Ocean. His first use of the neutrally buoyant float--known as the Swallow float--was in 1955, in an experiment to measure subsurface currents originally predicted by Stommel. During a subsequent North Atlantic voyage in 1962, Swallow, along with Stommel and WHOI researcher Valentine Worthington, used the floats to prove the existence of the Deep Western Boundary Current, circulating on the Continental Rise south of Cape Cod. The discovery of this current, named the mid-ocean mesoscale eddy field, launched a decade of international research. Commenting in his award lecture on both his invention and Stommel's influence, Swallow said, "Henry was such a dominant figure, such a continuous source of new ideas. I was just lucky enough to come up with one when Henry needed it." Paul K. Feyerabend, 70, a professor, emeritus, of philosophy at both the University of California, Berkeley, and the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich, died of a brain tumor on February 11 in Geneva. He had completed the last chapter of his autobiography only days before. Known around the world for his misanthropic observations on scientists and scientific knowledge, Feyerabend argued that scientists have no special claims on truth and often create meaning based on their own context and needs. "Scientists have more money, more authority, [and] more sex appeal than they deserve," he said in a 1979 Science profile ("Science and the anarchist," 206:534). Feyerabend's books included Against Method (New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1975), Science in a Free Society (Routledge, 1978), and Farewell to Reason (Routledge, 1987). Feyerabend received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1951. He achieved a measure of acclaim early in his career for contributions to the problems of empiricism and the philosophical foundations of quantum physics. Before joining the Berkeley faculty in 1959, Feyerabend was a protege of philosopher Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. He later became Popper's chief critic in the field of scientific rationalism.

People: NSF Presents $500,000 Waterman Award To Courant Institute Mathematician, British Oceanographer Nets Woods Hole's Stommel Medal; Obituary

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