Faculty Excellence Awards

Faculty Excellence Award selections are made by the Executive Committee of the department. While the decision is based primarily on research excellence, teaching and service contributions are also taken into account. There are always a large number of deserving colleagues; the committee often (but not always) gives preference to assistant and associate professors. You will find below brief descriptions of the work of this year's Faculty Excellence Award recipients, Sándor Kovács and Rekha Thomas.

Faculty Profile: Sándor Kovács

Sándor Kovács is an algebraic geometer. When he was an undergraduate at Eötvös University, the cradle for Hungarian mathematicians, Sándor discovered his fascination with the interaction between algebra and geometry while studying Fulton's book "Algebraic Curves". At around that time he met János Kollár, another Hungarian, then teaching at the University of Utah, and told him of his interest in algebraic geometry. When Kollár returned to Utah, he sent Sándor a letter suggesting some exercises he might tackle. So began a long-distance, pre-email, correspondence, with Sándor sending solutions and Kollár sending corrections, feedback, and a new list of problems after a delay of several weeks. After he completed his undergraduate degree in Budapest, Sándor followed Kollár to Utah, and under Kollár's guidance received his Ph.D. in 1995. After graduating, Sándor held positions at MIT and the University of Chicago.

Algebraic geometry has been a central part of mathematics since the time of the Greeks, and although several members of our department are consumers of algebraic geometry, we were without a genuine practitioner. We had recognized this gap, and had wanted to fill it for some time. We had the good fortune to hire Sándor in 2000, and his impact on our department has been considerable. He has attracted half a dozen good graduate students, and has taught several well-attended courses and run a number of lively seminars on a wide range of algebraic geometric topics. Sándor has also started up the Pacific Northwest Algebraic Geometry Seminar in collaboration with other mathematicians at the Universities of British Columbia and Oregon. He has been deeply involved in the Summer Institute in Mathematics at the University of Washington (SIMUW) for talented high school students.

Sándor's research concerns higher dimensional algebraic varieties of general type, especially moduli spaces that arise as spaces parametrizing families of surfaces, and singularities. The impact and quality of his work has been widely recognized. He received a Centennial Research Fellowship from the American Mathematical Society in 1998, a National Science Foundation Career Award in 2001, and a Sloan Fellowship in 2002.

When not doing mathematics, Sándor plays basketball and rows. He has recently taken up yoga, and in that context one is reminded of one of the most famous recent results in algebraic geometry, Mori's Bend and Break Theorem. Let's hope that is not an omen. Sándor is married to Tímea Tihanyi, an artist and sculptress working in ceramics and other media, whom he met in Budapest.

Paul Smith

Faculty Profile: Rekha Thomas

Rekha Thomas has broad ranging interests in mathematics. After getting her Ph.D. in operations research under the direction of Bernd Sturmfels, she spent time as a postdoctoral fellow working with the well-known economist Herbert Scarf. Currently, Thomas is interested in combinatorial problems related to algebra and geometry. In particular, Thomas researches problems that lie at the intersection of discrete optimization, computational algebra and polytopal geometry. Her recent works focus on the combinatorics of toric Hilbert schemes (with Maclagan), algebraic shifting (with Babson and Novik) and the complexity of Groebner bases (with Babson and Onn and with O'Shea). She has been involved in developing software for problems in computational algebra with Anders Jensen; these packages are available on her web site for other researchers in the field. Thomas is actively advising three Ph.D. candidates: Edwin O'Shea, Tristram Bogart and Anders Jensen.

Sara Billey