The 2023 André Aisenstadt Prize is awarded to Yakov Shlapentokh-Rothman (University of Toronto), and Elina Robeva (University of British Columbia).
Created in 1991 by the CRM, the André Aisenstadt Prize in Mathematics, which includes a scholarship and a medal, recognizes outstanding research results in pure or applied mathematics by a young Canadian mathematician.
Yakov Shlapentokh-Rothman
Yakov Shlapentokh-Rothman received his PhD from MIT in 2015 under the supervision of Igor Rodnianski. After a NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University (2015-2018), he continued there as Assistant Professor before joining the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto in 2021.
Professor Shlapentokh-Rothman works primarily on the mathematics of general relativity. His primary contributions concern the dynamical development of singularities associated to black holes; the decay of scalar and higher spin waves on black hole backgrounds; the existence of time-periodic “breather” solutions; and the understanding of weak null singularities in black hole interiors with matter present. He was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2021.
Elina Robeva
Elina Robeva received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2016, under the direction of Bernd Sturmfels, working in algebraic geometry, and is now working to apply algebra, geometry, and combinatorics to problems in data science and machine learning. Her thesis was honoured by Berkeley’s Bernard Friedman Prize in Applied Mathematics. After a NSF postdoctoral fellowship at MIT (2016-2019), she joined the Department of Mathematics of the University of British Columbia in 2019 where she supervises a diverse group of students. She has organized numerous seminars and symposia.
Professor Robeva’s work connects statistics, geometry, Lie theory, and non-commutative algebra, and has made ground-breaking contributions to the statistics and geometry that underlie data science topics of considerable interest to scientists and engineers. She has won the SIAM Early Career Prize in Algebraic Geometry, the CAIMS Early Career Award, as well as the UBC/PIMS Mathematical Sciences Young Faculty Award.