Joël Bellaïche Receives American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship
Award is based on outstanding research achievement
Associate Professor Joël Bellaïche has been awarded the prestigious American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship for the 2010-2011academic year. The fellowship is presented annually to outstanding mathematicians who have held the doctoral degree for between three and twelve years. The primary selection criterion is excellence in research achievement. The stipend for the 2010-2011 Centennial Fellowship is $77,000, plus an expense allowance of $7,700.
Bellaïche was born and raised in Paris. As an undergraduate and graduate student, he attended the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He defended his thesis in 2002 at the University of Orsay, where his advisor was Laurent Clozel. After a short postdoctoral stay at the University of Padua in Italy and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and after one year at the University of Nice, France, he moved permanently to the United States and became a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University in 2004. Since January 2008, he has been an associate professor at Brandeis University.
Bellaïche’s main interest is in the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and more generally the Bloch-Kato conjectures. Those conjectures, still wide open, relate some analytic invariants of a motive over a number field (more specifically, the values of its L-function or its p-adic L-function) with some arithmetic invariant of the motive (e.g. the Mordell-Weil group of an elliptic curve). Bellaïche’s approach uses the theory of automorphic forms.
Next year, he plans to work on higher rank p-adic L-functions and their relations with the universal families of automorphic forms called eigenvarieties.
About the American Mathematical Society
Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the 30,000-member American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.
