Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Andrea Mia Ghez | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1965 | | | | | | |
Andrea M. Ghez, distinguished professor of Physics & Astronomy and head of UCLA's Galactic Center Group, is a world-leading expert in observational astrophysics. She earned her B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1987 and her Ph.D. from Caltech in 1992, and has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1994. She has used the Keck telescopes to demonstrate the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, with a mass 4 million times that of our sun. This is the best evidence yet that these exotic objects really do exist, and provides us with a wonderful opportunity to study the fundamental laws of physics in the extreme environment near a black hole, and learn what role this black hole has played in the formation and evolution of our galaxy.
Professor Ghez has actively disseminated her work to a wide variety of audiences through more than 100 refereed papers and 200 invited talks, as well features in textbooks, documentaries, and science exhibits. She has received numerous honors and awards including the Crafoord Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Aaronson Award from the University of Arizona, the Sackler Prize from Tel Aviv University, the American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, the American Astronomical Society's Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, a Sloan Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, the 2012 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, and several teaching awards. Her most recent service work includes membership on the National Research Council's Board on Physics & Astronomy, the Thirty-Meter-Telescope's Science Advisory Committee, the Keck Observatory Science Steering Committee, and the Research Strategies Working Group of the UC Commission on the Future.
Andrea Ghez won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. S. James Gates | | | Institution: | University of Maryland | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | | | | |
Sylvester James (Jim) Gates, Jr., is College Park Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and emeritus director of its Center for String and Particle Theory. Known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory, Dr. Gates uses mathematical models to explore the elementary particles and fundamental forces of nature.
Dr. Gates completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning two bachelor’s degrees (in mathematics and physics) in 1973 and a Ph.D. in physics (foocused on elementary particle physics and quantum field theory) in 1977. His doctoral thesis was the first thesis at MIT to deal with supersymmetry, a topic that has dominated theoretical physics since that time.
Before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1984, Dr. Gates held postdoctoral appointments as a Harvard University Society of Fellows Junior Fellow and as a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He currently serves as a member of the Maryland State Board of Education and the U. S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
In 1984, working with M. T. Grisaru, M. Rocek, and W. Siegel, Dr. Gates co-authored Superspace, the first comprehensive book on the topic of supersymmetry. He has published more than two hundred research papers. Some of his research in physics has led to the creation of surprising new results in the field of mathematics, including complex manifolds, network theory, and representation theory. International aspects of his career includes appointments as a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (South Africa), Professor-at-large at the University of Western Australia (Australia), and a Distinguished Research Chair of the Perimeter Institute (Canada), and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (United Kingdom). He authored the 2006 Italian book L’arte della fisica, published in Rome, and popular-level discussion entitled ‘‘Symbols of Power,’’ published in the British journal Physics World. "Symbols of Power" describes research begun in 2004 on Adinkras, a new concept that links computer codes like those used in browsers to the supersymmetric equations of fundamental physics.
During his career, Dr. Gates has received a number of honors for his teaching, including the 1999 College Science Teacher of the Year from the Washington Academy of Sciences, the 2002 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher from the University of Maryland, and the 2003 Klopsteg Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers. In 2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science honored him with the Public Understanding of Science Award. He won the National Medal of Science in 2012.
Dr. Gates is a member of the board of trustees of Society for Science & the Public and of the board of advisors for the Department of Energy's Fermi National Laboratory. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. In 2018 the American Physical Society elected him to its presidential line. He will serve as vice president of the American Physical Society in 2019, president-elect in 2020, and president in 2021.
He has been featured extensively in many science documentaries on physics, most notably The Elegant Universe in 2003. In 2006, he completed a DVD lecture series titled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality for The Teaching Company to make the complexities of unification theory comprehensible to laypeople. During the 2008 World Science Festival, Dr. Gates narrated a ballet, The Elegant Universe, with an on-line resource presentation of the art forms (called Adinkras) connected to his scientific research. The NOVA/PBS fall 2011 presentation of the science documentary The Fabric of the Cosmos prominently features Dr. Gates. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Charles M. Geschke | | | Institution: | Adobe Systems Incorporated | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 107 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | Death Date: | April 16, 2021 | | | | | | |
Charles (Chuck) Geschke co-founded Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1982. A leader in the software industry for more than 40 years, Geschke retired from his position as president of Adobe in 2000 and continued to share the chairmanship of the board with Adobe’s co-founder John Warnock. Prior to co-founding Adobe Systems, Geschke formed the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1980, where he directed research activities in the fields of computer science, graphics, image processing, and optics. From 1972 to 1980, he was a principal scientist and researcher at Xerox PARC's Computer Sciences Laboratory. Before beginning full time graduate studies in 1968, he was on the faculty of the mathematics department of John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Geschke has actively participated on several boards of educational institutions, non-profits, technology companies, and arts organizations. From 1989 until 2007 Geschke served on Board of Trustees of the University of San Francisco and chaired the board for four years beginning in 2002. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the San Francisco Symphony and the board of the Commonwealth Club of California. He also serves on the board of the Egan Maritime Foundation, the board of the National Leadership Roundtable On Church Management and the board of the Nantucket Boys and Girls Club.
In 1995, Geschke was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In October 2009, Geschke was awarded the 2008 National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama. In the fall of 2010, Geschke was presented with the Marconi Society Award for scientific contributions to human progress in the field of information technology. In the spring of 2012, Geschke was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Industry and business leaders, including the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Carnegie-Mellon University, the National Computer Graphics Association, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, have honored Geschke’s technical and managerial achievements. He received the regional Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1991 and the national Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2003. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the Computer History Museum and in 2005 he was given the Exemplary Community Leadership Award by the NCCJ of Silicon Valley. Geschke received the Medal of Achievement from the American Electronics Association (AeA) in 2006. In 2007, he received the John W. Gardner Leadership Award. In 2000, Geschke was ranked the seventh most influential graphics person of the last millennium by Graphic Exchange magazine. He and his wife Nancy were honored with the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Award in 2012 for their charitable endeavors.
Geschke holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University and a M.S. in mathematics and an A.B. in Latin, both from Xavier University. He died on April 16, 2021. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Donald E. Knuth | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 107 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Donald E. Knuth (B.S. and M.S., Case Institute of Technology 1960; Ph.D., California Institute of Technology 1963) is Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, where he supervised the Ph.D. dissertations of 28 students since becoming a professor in 1968. He is the author of numerous books, including four volumes (so far) of The Art of Computer Programming, five volumes of Computers & Typesetting, nine volumes of collected papers, and a non-technical book entitled 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated. His software systems TeX and MF are extensively used for book publishing throughout the world. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society, and he is a foreign associate of the French, Norwegian, Bavarian, and Russian science academies as well as the Royal Society of London. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1974; the National Medal of Science from President Carter in 1979; the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1986; the Adelskold Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1994; the Harvey Prize from the Technion of Israel in 1995; the John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1995; the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation in 1996; the Frontiers of Knowledge award from the BBVA Foundation in 2010; the Faraday Medal from the IET in 2011; and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who's Who in 2017. He holds honorary doctorates from Oxford University, the University of Paris, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the University of St. Petersburg, the University of Marne-la-Vallee, Masaryk University, St. Andrews University, Athens University of Economics and Business, the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, the University of Tubingen, the University of Oslo, the University of Antwerp, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the University of Bordeaux, the University of Glasgow, and nineteen colleges and universities in America. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Terence Tao | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1975 | | | | | | |
Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1975. He has been a professor of mathematics at UCLA since 1999, having completed his PhD under Elias Stein at Princeton in 1996. Tao's areas of research include harmonic analysis, PDE, combinatorics, and number theory. He has received a number of awards, including the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bochner Prize in 2002, the Fields Medal and SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2006, the MacArthur Fellowship and Ostrowski Prize in 2007, and the Waterman Award in 2008. Terence Tao also currently holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Sciences (Corresponding Member), the National Academy of Sciences (Foreign member), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was named a Simons Investigator in 2012 by the Simons Foundation and was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics that same year. In 2014 he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, established by Yuri Milner, along with four others. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012. | |
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