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.

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CMS 2008 Jeffery-Williams Prize: Dr. Martin Barlow (University of British
Columbia)
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The Jeffery-Williams Prize recognizes mathematicians who have made outstanding
contributions to mathematical research. Professor Martin Barlow is the
leading international expert in the study of diffusions on fractals and other
disordered media. He has made a number of profound contributions to a variety
of fields including probabilistic methods in partial differential equations,
stochastic differential equations, filtration enlargement, local times,
measure-valued diffusions and mathematical finance.

In the 1980's he resolved a thirty year old problem with his derivation of
necessary and sufficient conditions (the latter with John Hawkes) for the
continuity of local time of a Lévy process. This was the resolution of a
problem which had attracted the efforts of Hale Trotter, Ronald Getoor and
Harry Kesten among others.

In the 1990's he carried out a detailed study of diffusions on a variety of
fractal-like sets and derived precise upper and lower bounds on their heat
kernels. This work laid the groundwork for a new area of study in probability
which has attracted experts in Dirichlet forms, diffusions on manifolds
and statistical mechanics. He currently is at the forefront of a program to
study the transport properties of a broad class of graphs and manifolds. The
original motivation for the study of diffusion on fractals came from the
physics community who were interested in more general disordered random
media but viewed typical fractals like the Sierpinski carpets and gaskets
as good testing grounds for highly inhomogeneous media. Thanks in large
part to the pioneering efforts of Martin Barlow the discipline has reached
the point where the original objectives of the physicists are now within
mathematical reach.  Barlow remains at the leading edge of this research
with his recent work giving sharp results for the behaviour of transition
probabilities for random walks on super-critical percolation clusters.

Martin Barlow received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University in
1975 and completed his Doctoral degree with David Williams at the University
College of Swansea in Wales in 1978. He held Royal Society University Research
Fellowship at Cambridge University from 1985 to 1992, when he joined the
Mathematics Department at University of British Columbia. He currently
is Professor of Mathematics at UBC. He has held a number of visiting
professorships at leading universities including University of Tokyo,
Cornell University, Imperial College, London, and Université de Paris.

Past distinctions include the Rollo Davidson Prize from Cambridge University,
the Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society and an invited
lecture at the 1990 ICM in Kyoto. He has served the Canadian mathematical
community on the Research Committee of the CMS and on the Editorial Board of
the Canadian Journal Mathematics and the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin. He
also has served on a number of international panels and editorial boards and
recently finished a term as Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Communications in
Probability. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 2006 was
elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London).

Dr. Barlow will present the 2008 Jeffery-Williams Prize Lecture at the CMS
Summer Meeting in Montréal (June 2008).

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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