Skip to main content

Northwestern hosts 2020 Nemmers Prize winners for ceremony, academic activities

Northwestern will honor the winners of the 2020 Nemmers Prizes in earth sciences, economics and mathematics during a private ceremony on May 23. Winners of the prestigious prizes are among the most eminent in their fields, and each receives a $200,000 stipend for their accomplishments.

During their visits to campus, Nemmers Prize winners interact with the Northwestern community, meeting with students and faculty, delivering lectures, and participating in workshops and seminars.

The 2020 honorees—Nalini Anantharaman for mathematics, Katherine Freeman for earth sciences and Claudia Goldin for economics—are scheduled for active visits to campus.

Nalini Anantharaman, professor at the Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research at the University of Strasbourg, will visit the Department of Mathematics from May 23 through June 3. On May 25, she will deliver a colloquium titled “Uncertainty principle and uncertainty inequalities” in which she will discuss mathematical forms of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics and its relationship with quantum unique ergodicity. Following the colloquium, Anantharaman will join members of the department, including graduate students, for a reception.

During the week May 30, the Math Department will host a conference in Anantharaman’s honor. Organized by Steve Zelditch and Nir Avni, the Laplacians on Random Hyperbolic Surfaces and on Random Graphs conference will include a mini-course on random hyperbolic surfaces, co-taught by Anantharaman and Hugo Parlier of the University of Luxembourg.

Katherine Freeman, professor at Pennsylvania State University, has been co-teaching a spring Nemmers Seminar Supercharged course with Magdalena Osburn in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. The course includes graduate students from both institutions and engages the students in discussion of published work by invited speakers. Speakers selected to present this quarter aligned with Freeman’s research, including topics of isotope and organic geochemistry, climate reconstruction, astrobiology, and hominid development.

Freeman is in residence with the department through June 9 and will give a public lecture titled “Fingerprints of Life” on June 7. The lecture will be followed by a private reception for the full department community as well as collaborating scholars from the University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois State Geological Survey, Northern Illinois University and University of Chicago. Freeman will continue to mentor a select number of graduate and undergraduate students through the Fall Quarter based on research work began in Spring 2022.

Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, will share her expertise through in-person and virtual events. She will meet with graduate students working on dissertations in economic history and labor economics as well as with junior faculty in the Applied Microeconomics field. Goldin also will remotely attend the Economic History Seminar and the Economic History Lunch, both of which will take place the week of May 23. Goldin will present her research at a joint Economic History/Applied Microeconomics workshop in Fall Quarter 2022.