Brown U. Professor Wins National Science Award
Friday, October 15, 2010
Brown University mathematician David Mumford has won the National Medal of Science, the nation’s top scientific honor.
“As collaborator and catalyst, David Mumford was an early contributor to fields of inquiry that have blossomed at Brown — brain science, computer vision, neurobiology, cognitive science, the biology and psychology of perception — and to his own areas of pure and applied mathematics,” said Brown President Ruth J. Simmons. “He continues to inspire collaborators in many fields, former students now in productive careers, and his professional colleagues in the United States and abroad.”
The National Medal of Science was created by Congress in 1959. President John F. Kennedy was the first to present the award, to engineer and physicist Theodore von Kármán in 1963.
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A Brown University press release said Mumford’s contributions to mathematics “fundamentally changed algebraic geometry” and brought him a number of honors in the field, including a MacArthur Foundation fellowship from 1987 to 1992. He is best known for inventing geometric invariant theory. His work has also been used in string theory.
