Professor Dmitriy Bilyk receives Alexanderson Award from American Institute of Mathematics
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (10/3/2024) – Professor Dmitriy Bilyk and collaborators were recently honored with the 2024 Alexanderson Award from the American Institute of Mathematics. Bilyk and his co-authors – Alexey Glazyrin, Ryan Matzke, Josiah Park, and Oleksandr Vlasiuk – received the award for their paper “Energy on spheres and discreteness of minimizing measures” published in the Journal of Functional Analysis in 2021.
“Energy on spheres and discreteness of minimizing measures” explores the minimization of energy integrals on the sphere with a focus on an interesting clustering phenomenon: for certain types of potentials, optimal measures are discrete or are supported on small sets. This phenomenon is observed in models in computational chemistry (self-assembly), population biology (emerging collective behavior), and a variety of other areas. However, in many cases, theoretical explanations remain lacking. Parts of the award-winning paper are based on PhD thesis work by Ryan Matzke, a graduate student advised by Bilyk who completed his doctorate at UMN in 2021. Matzke is now an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University.
“We were very honored and humbled to receive the 2024 Alexanderson award for our joint paper “Energy on spheres and discreteness of minimizing measures,”” Bilyk says. “This publication is a part of a bigger research project which was collaborative and multifaceted, involving a synergy of theoretical, computational, and experimental mathematics, as well as a group of participants at various stages of the academic careers and with different mathematical backgrounds, expertise, and interests.”
The Alexanderson Award is given in honor of Gerald Alexanderson, Professor of Mathematics at Santa Clara University and founding chair of AIM’s Board of Trustees. The award recognizes outstanding research articles arising from AIM research activities that have been published within the past three years. This year’s award will be given at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) Awards Celebration on Wednesday, January 8, 2025 in Seattle. Bilyk will deliver the AIM Alexanderson Award Lecture at JMM on Thursday, January 9.