- Ravi Vakil
Ravi D. Vakil (born
February 22 ,1970 ,Toronto ,Ontario ,Canada ) is a Canadian-American mathematician. Vakil attended high school atMartingrove Collegiate Institute inEtobicoke ,Ontario , where he won several mathematical contests and olympiads. After earning a BSc and MSc from theUniversity of Toronto in 1992, he completed a Ph.D. in mathematics atHarvard University in 1997 underJoseph Harris . [ [http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=18790 Mathematics genealogy] ] He has since been an instructor at bothPrinceton University and MIT. Since the fall of 2001, he has taught atStanford University , [ [http://math.stanford.edu/directory/faculty.html Stanford mathematics faculty] ] becoming a full professor in 2007.Vakil is an algebraic geometer and his research work spans over enumerative geometry, topology, Gromov-Witten theory, and classical Algebraic Geometry. He has solved several old problems in
Schubert calculus . Among other results, he proved that all Schubert problems are enumerative over thereal number s, a result that resolves an issue mathematicians have worked on for at least two decades. Vakil has also proved several results regarding theMurphy's law inalgebraic geometry . ["Murphy's Law in algebraic geometry: Badly-behaved deformation spaces", "Invent. Math." 164 (2006), 569–590.]Vakil has received many awards, including an NSF Career Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an
American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship, a G. de B. Robinson Prize for the best paper published in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, and the André-Aisenstadt Prize from theCentre de Recherches Mathématiques at theUniversité de Montréal .He has participated with the Canadian team in three
IMO 's winning two gold and one silver medals and was the fourth person to be a four-time Putnam Fellow in the history of the contest. Also, he has been the coordinator of weekly Putnam preparation seminars at Stanford.References
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