Geordie Williamson to Receive 2016 Clay Research Award

Geordie Williamson, advanced researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn will be awarded the 2016 Clay Research Award in recognition of his groundbreaking work in representation theory and related fields.

In particular, the award recognises two major breakthroughs. First, his proof, with Ben Elias, of Soergel’s conjecture on bimodules associated to Coxeter groups. This established the combinatorial result that the coefficients of the Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials are non-negative, as well as yielding a new proof of Kazhdan and Lusztig’s conjectured character formula for representations of complex semi-simple Lie algebras.

The second is the construction (building on earlier work with Ben Elias and Xuhua He) of counterexamples to the expected bounds in Lusztig’s conjectured character formula for rational representations of algebraic groups in positive characteristics that grow exponentially with the rank of the group.

The awards will be presented at the 2016 Clay Research Conference at Oxford on Wednesday, 28 September.