Jacopo De Simoi to receive the 2020 Coxeter-James Prize
OTTAWA (ON) – The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) is pleased to announce that Dr. Jacopo De Simoi (Toronto) has been named the recipient of the 2020 Coxeter-James Prize for his work in the area of dynamical systems. Dr. De Simoi will receive his award and present a prize lecture during the CMS Winter Meeting in Montreal, Quebec, December 4-7, 2020.
Dr. De Simoi works mainly in the field of dynamical systems but he has very wide interests spanning from the study of near integrable systems to strongly chaotic ones. He has worked on some of the most prominent outstanding problems in the field, from the study of the standard map to the statistical properties of partially hyperbolic systems.
Jacopo De Simoi, together with C. Liverani, has published two papers in Inventiones Mathematicae which dramatically impact the theory of chaos in slow-fast dynamical systems. Such systems arise naturally in classical problems of Hamiltonian dynamics and should be thought of as having two characteristic time scales; the rough picture of the dynamics can be captured by a suitable averaging of the behaviour of the orbits. By understanding the combination of slow-fast dynamics as a small random perturbation of the averaged dynamical system, De Simoi and Liverani proved that it exhibits a strong form of chaos for a new class of dynamical systems which forms an open set in a parameter space.
After obtaining Bachelor’s and Masters’ degrees in Physics from the University of Pisa in Italy, Jacopo De Simoi received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 2009. He has held postdoctoral positions in Paris, Rome, and Toronto, before moving to the University of Toronto in Mississauga, where he has been assistant professor since 2016.