Visiting Members Honored

IAS is proud to announce the recent honors received by Visiting Members Prof. Thomas Y. HOU, Prof. Ching W. TANG and Prof. Shou-Wu ZHANG.

Prof. Ching W Tang, Doris Johns Cherry Professor of Chemical Engineering from University of Rochester, has been awarded the 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. Jointly awarded to Prof Stuart Rice from University of Chicago and Prof Krzysztof Matyjaszewski from Carnegie Mellon University, the Prize is awarded for their contributions to the chemical sciences in the field of synthesis, properties and an understanding of organic materials.  

Prof. Tang, who was born in Hong Kong, created two of the most active fields in organic materials, organic light emitting diodes (OLED) and organic photovoltaics (OPV). OLED has been used to create displays in mobile phones, computers, and televisions that are much more energy efficient and offer a clearer picture than LCD displays, while photovoltaics could bring major improvements in the ability to produce low-cost solar cells to capture energy from the sun. The Wolf Prize in Chemistry, given annually by the Wolf Foundation, is widely considered second in prestige to the Nobel Prize.

Prof. Thomas Y Hou, Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics from California Institute of Technology, and Prof. Shouwu Zhang, Professor of Mathematics from Columbia University, have been recently elected as Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the most prestigious honorary societies in the United States.

Prof. Hou is a renowned scholar in vortex dynamics and multiscale problems. He won the Computational and Applied Sciences Award from the United States Association of Computational Mechanics in 2005, the Morningside Gold Medal in Applied Mathematics in 2004, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing in 2001, the Francois N. Frenkiel Award from the Division of Fluid Mechanics of the American Physical Society in 1998, the Feng Kang Prize in Scientific Computing in 1997. He was named SIAM Fellow in 2009, and was a Sloan Fellow from 1990 to 1992.

Prof. Zhang is well known for his research in number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry. He was an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians at Berlin in 1998 and was awarded a Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics in the same year by the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians for his work on the Bogomolov conjecture and Gross-Zagier formula. He was a Sloan Research Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an L.-K. Hua Chair Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Changjiang Chair Professor at Tsinghua University, and a Prize Fellow at Clay Mathematical Institute.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded during the Revolutionary Wars by John ADAMS, James BOWDOIN, John HANCOCK and other leaders of the United States, whose members include more than 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer prizewinners. Both Prof. Hou and Prof. Zhang are amongst the six newly elected Fellows in the Section of Mathematics, and the only two Chinese in the group.