Svetlana Jitomirskaya to give plenary talk at International Congress of Mathematicians

Professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya of the UCI Department of Mathematics will, come July 2022, give a plenary talk at the International Congress of Mathematics (ICM). Receiving an invitation to give one of the 20 plenary lectures to the thousands of ICM participants is a special honor in the mathematics profession, and Jitomirskaya will be the first-ever plenary ICM speaker with UCI affiliation. Often dubbed the Olympics of mathematics, the ICM happens once every four years, and it encompasses all areas of mathematics, from pure to applied, as well as computer science, with top prizes in mathematics and computer science awarded during the meeting. ICM also features talks in 19 sections — about 200 at each Congress — and receiving an invitation to give one of those talks is another hall-of-fame-level honor, one Jitomirskaya received in 2002. Other UCI faculty who gave ICM sectional talks are Richard Schoen in 1983, Matthew Foreman in 1998, Roman Vershynin in 2010, as well as professors emeriti Ronald Stern in 1998, Peter Li and Karl Rubin in 2002, and Chuu-Lian Terng in 2006. Schoen gave plenary talks in 1986 and 2010 when he was a faculty member at UC San Diego and then Stanford University. Jitomirskaya, who researches analysis problems motivated by quantum physics, expects the subject of her talk to orbit around arithmetic spectral transitions.