Michael Hartz awarded Zemanek prize in functional analysis

Idly skimming through the September issue of the Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society, I stumbled upon the very happy announcement that the 2020 Jaroslav and Barbara Zemanek prize in functional analysis with emphasis on operator theory was awarded to Michael Hartz.

The breakthrough result that every complete Nevanlinna-Pick space has the column-row property is one of his latest results and has appeared on the arxiv this May. Besides solving an interesting open problem, it is a really elegant and strong paper.

It is satisfying to see a young and very talented mathematician get recognition!

Full disclosure 😉 Michael is a sort of mathematical relative (he was a PhD student of my postdoc supervisor Ken Davidson), a collaborator (together with Ken Davidson we wrote the paper Multipliers of embedded discs) and a friend. I have to boast that from the moment that I heard about him I knew that he will do great things – in his first paper, which he wrote as a masters student, he ingeniously solved an open problem of Davidson, Ramsey and myself. Since then he has worked a lot on some problems that are close to my interests, and I have been following him with admiration.

Congratulations Michael!

Matthew Kennedy awarded CMS 2012 Doctoral Prize

One of the nicest things that happen on math blogs is that people write expository posts on other people’s work. Tim Gowers and Terry Tao have set a fine example in their expositions of the works of Fields Medalists or Abel Prize laureates. These are among the most interesting and important posts out there, I think.

Recently, at the Canadian Mathematical Society’s Winter Meeting, Matthew Kennedy was awarded the CMS 2012 Doctoral Prize (at the meeting several other prizes were awarded by the CMS as you can see on the meeting’s homepage). See here for the media release, and here for a description of the prize and a list of past recipients.

Matt gave a plenary lecture at the CMS meeting surveying (some of) his work. Here are the slides, which are certainly worth looking at (thanks to Matt for allowing me to post them). Note that on the last slide there are photos of two gentlemen with no captions; these are Ken Davidson (on the left, Matt’s PhD supervisor) and Heydar Radjavi (Matt’s undergraduate research supervisor).

In this post I will describe a couple of Matt’s first really big results, one of which didn’t make it into his talk. These are the existence of wandering vectors for (certain) free semigroup algebras, and the reflexitivity of free semigroup algebras. These result appeared in the tour-de-force paper “Wandering vectors and the reflexivity of free semigroup algebras”; here are links to arxiv, mathscinet, and the official version in Crelle.