For release: IMMEDIATE (March 13, 2007)

THREE HONOURED FOR EXCEPTIONAL RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) has selected Martin Barlow as
the recipient of the 2008 Jeffery-Williams Prize, Izabella Laba as the
recipient of the 2008 Krieger-Nelson Prize, and Vinayak Vastal as the
winner of the 2007 Coxeter-James Prize.

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CMS 2008 Krieger-Nelson Prize: Dr. Izabella Laba (University of British
Columbia)
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The Krieger-Nelson Prize recognizes outstanding research by a female
mathematician.

Izabella Laba has established a position as one of Canada's leading harmonic
analysts. She has made major contributions to the Kakeya problem, and to
the study of translational tilings and distance sets.

Although her current work is in harmonic analysis, Laba began her career
working in on N-body scattering theory in mathematical physics. After
obtaining her Ph.D. in 1994 at the University of Toronto with Michael Sigal
she first attracted attention with her proof (with Christian Gérard) of
asymptotic completeness for a large class of N-body systems in the presence
of a magnetic field. This work became the subject of a monograph in the AMS
mathematical surveys and monographs series.

During her time as Hedrick Assistant Professor at UCLA, Laba interests turned
to harmonic analysis. A central problem in this field is the Kakeya conjecture
concerning Besicovitch sets. A Besicovitch set is a subset of n-dimensional
Euclidean space containing a line segment in every direction. The Kakeya
conjecture states that such a set must have Minkowski and Hausdorff dimension
n. This conjecture is linked to important open problems in harmonic analysis
like the restriction conjecture and the Bochner-Riesz conjecture. To date,
the best known lower bound on the dimension of a Besicovitch set in three
dimensions is due to Katz, Laba and Tao.

After her time at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Laba moved
to Princeton and then in 2000 to the University of British Columbua where she
was promoted to full Professor in 2005. Here she has continued her work in
harmonic analysis, with important results in study of translational tilings
and distance sets.

In addition to her research articles and the monograph mentioned above, Laba
(with Carol Shubin) co-edited Thomas Wolff's ?Lectures in Harmonic Analysis?,
which he had left uncompleted at the time of his death.

Laba's outstanding work has been recognized with a UBC Faculty of Science
Achievement Award for Research in 2002 and the CMS Coxeter-James Prize in 2004.

Dr. Laba will present the 2008 Krieger-Nelson Prize Lecture at the CMS Summer
Meeting in Montréal (June 2008).

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For more information contact:

Dr. Thomas S. Salisbury			Dr. Graham P. Wright
President 				Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society 	ou	Canadian Mathematical Society
416-736-2100 x33921			(613) 562-5702
president@cms.math.ca			director@cms.math.ca