People : Russian, Belgian, And Two Frenchmen Rake In Honors As 1994 Fields Medalists, UC-San Francisco Physiologist Assumes Directorship Of NIH Neurological Institute

Four mathematicians--Jean Bourgain, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J.; Pierre-Louis Lions of the University of Paris-Dauphine in France; Jean- Christophe Yoccoz, University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, France; and Efim I. Zelmanov, a professor at the University of Chicago currently on leave from the University of Wisconsin, Madison--have been awarded the 1994 Fields Medals. The medals were presented during the International Congress of Mathematicians, held August 3 through 11 in Zurich, Switzerland. The Fields Medals--officially known as the International Medals for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics--are presented every four years to two to four individuals under the age of 40 in recognition of both their existing work and the promise of future achievements. Unlike the Nobel and other big prizes, however, the Fields Medals carry no monetary award. Winners are decided upon by a committee within the International Mathematical Union--a professional mathematical society of worldwide membership, headquartered this year in Rio de Janiero, Brazil--which arranges the International Congress. Thirty-four individuals have been honored since 1936. Zelmanov, 38, was recognized for his work in the area of abstract algebra and group theory, specifically for his proof of a mathematical conjecture called the restricted Burnside problem, named for British mathematician William Burnside. "In 1902, Burnside formulated a conjecture on what makes a group finite," explains Zelmanov. "He said that if imposed, two restrictions--a [fixed] number of generators and periodicity--are enough to make a group finite." Though this conjecture--known as the Burnside Problem--was shown to be false in 1968, Zelmanov states that in a few important cases it still holds true. He furnished proofs for these special cases, called the restricted Burnside problem (E.I. Zelmanov, "A solution of the restricted Burnside problem in 2-groups," Mathematics of the USSR-Sbornik, 72:543-565, 1992). Zelmanov, who moved to the United States in 1990, did most of his work on the problem while a professor at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where he completed his doctorate in 1980. Zelmanov's colleague Jonathan Alperin at the University of Chicago refers to the Russian mathematician's achievements as "a real triumph." According to Princeton UniversityUs Charles Feffer-man, himself a 1978 Fields medalist, Bourgain, 40, has made "very deep contributions" to several areas of mathematics. Bourgain's particular areas of expertise in mathematics are: the geometry of infinite dimensional spaces; harmonic analysis, which is the study of complicated vibrations; and non-linear wave equations. Educated in his native Belgium (Ph.D. from the Free University of Brussels, 1977), Bourgain came to the Institute for Advanced Study earlier this year. Previously, he held a professorship at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris. According to the Science Citation Index of the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, Lions, 38, has published more than 30 original mathematical papers in the past four years alone. His versatility is exemplified in the wide variety of mathematical topics his papers cover, including partial differential equations, numerical analysis, and calculations for such scientific methods as image processing, fluid mechanics, and the viscosity of solutions. Yoccoz, 37, is the youngest of the medalists this year, and like Lions hails from France. His most recent publication, a seminal paper on hyperbolic sets entitled "Homoclinic tangencies for hyperbolic sets of large Hausdorff dimensions," appears in Acta Mathematica (172:91- 136, 1994). Zach W. Hall, formerly a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, has assumed the directorship of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), in Bethesda, Md. He began in his new job September 1. NINDS is the agency within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research on brain and nervous-system disorders. As director, Hall will be in charge of an annual budget of more than $630 million, which goes toward maintaining a staff of about 700 scientists and administrators, as well as supporting research at various institutions across the United States. Coming into the position, he says, he has "no set agenda." "This is a tremendously exciting period for the neurosciences," Hall says. "I hope to be able to work cooperatively with the other [NIH] agencies to promote both extramural and intramural research programs." A particular challenge for the institute, he says, will be in the clinical applications of fundamental neuroscience research. "Neurologists have always had elegant ways of diagnosing various disorders," he says, adding that treatments have not emerged at the same pace. "In the coming decade we should be able to apply our findings from basic research more effectively toward treating neurologic diseases." Other areas of neurology that Hall sees as making great progress are developmental neurobiology and central nervous system physiology. A native of Atlanta, Hall, 56, studied English (B.A. 1958) at Yale University, New Haven, Conn., and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., in 1966. He came to UC-San Francisco's department of physiology in 1976, and headed the biomedical sciences graduate program there from 1992 until his appointment at NINDS. --Neeraja Sankaran

People : Russian, Belgian, And Two Frenchmen Rake In Honors As 1994 Fields Medalists, UC-San Francisco Physiologist Assumes Directorship Of NIH Neurological Institute

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