April 8, 1996 Contact: Amy Adams or Robert Irion (408/459-2495)

SLOAN FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP GOES TO UCSC MATHEMATICIAN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Jonathan Weitsman, an associate professor of mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, is one of 100 outstanding young researchers who have received prestigious fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the foundation announced Friday. Weitsman will receive $35,000 per year for two years.

Weitsman studies a field of mathematics called symplectic geometry. From the Greek symplegma, meaning complex, entangled, or plaited together, symplectic geometry provides a unified and coherent framework for many different physical phenomena. By revealing underlying geometric structure where none appeared to exist, symplectic geometry has become a powerful tool in optics, astrophysics, electronics, and other fields. Many problems of interest to Weitsman arise in the theory of Riemann surfaces--the geometry of curved spaces in two dimensions--as well as in three- and four-dimensional geometry and topology.

Weitsman joined the UCSC faculty in 1994. He has bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University. He has held appointments at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, the Newton Institute in Cambridge, England, and Columbia University.

Since 1955, the Sloan Foundation has awarded more than $72 million dollars to about 3,100 researchers. Nineteen former Sloan Fellows have received Nobel Prizes. The average age of the 1996 fellows is about 32 years. They were selected from more than 400 scientists in the early stages of their careers, based on their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. Candidates are nominated by department chairs and other senior scholars familiar with their talents.

Sloan scholars are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to use fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims. This flexibility can be of great value to young scientists who are at a pivotal stage in establishing their own independent research projects.

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