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.

***************************************************************************
CMS 2007 Coxeter-James Prize: Dr Vinayak Vastal (University of British
Columbia)
***************************************************************************

The Coxeter-James Prize recognizes young mathematicians who have made
outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Vinayak Vatsal has made fundamental contributions to the Iwasawa Theory
of elliptic curves, introducing profound techniques from ergodic theory
into the subject and obtaining startling theorems on the non-vanishing of
p-adic L-functions and mu-invariants that had previously been unobtainable
by more orthodox analytic methods. His 2002 Inventiones paper on the uniform
distribution of Heegner points led to the complete solution of a fundamental
conjecture of Mazur concerning such L-functions (now the Vatsal-Cornut
theorem). In the words of his referees, these results have ?transformed our
understanding of the ranks of elliptic curves in towers of number fields?.

Dr. Vatsal received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1992 from Stanford
University and a Ph.D. in 1997 from the Princeton University under the
supervision of Professor Andrew Wiles. After a post-doctoral fellowship at
the University of Toronto, he joined the University of British Columbia in
1999, where he is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics.

Dr. Vatsal was selected as a Sloan Fellow for 2002-2004, he received the
2004 André Aisenstadt Prize of the Centres de Recherches Mathématiques, the
2006 Ribenboim Prize of the Canadian Number Theory Association and was an
invited speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

Dr. Vinayak Vatsal will present the 2007 Coxeter-James Prize Lecture at the CMS
Winter Meeting hosted by the University of Western Ontario in December 2007.

                              **********************************

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