Cornellians at the International Congress of Mathematicians

The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) organized by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) meets every four years. It is the largest conference on mathematics. The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Gauss Prize, and the Chern Medal are awarded during each congress. This page records the Cornell faculty and former Cornell Ph.D.s who have been invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Plenary speakers address the entire congress and an invitation is one of the highest recognition a mathematician can receive from the community. Four plenary speakers were invited at the first Congress, hosted in Zurich in 1897, and about twenty plenary speakers are invited at recent Congresses.

The International Mathematical Congress that was held in Chicago in 1893 on the occasion of the Wold's Columbian Exposition is considered the precursor of the ICM as well as a key event in the development of in the United States.

In the picture, Felix Klein stand in the middle. Seating on the first row are James Oliver (Chair at Cornell) and William Story (Chair at Clark University). Henry Turner Eddy, the first Cornell Ph.D., is fifth from the left on the third row. Also on the third row, second from the right, is Cornell's professor James McMahon.

This page provides the complete list of those Cornell faculty and former Ph.D. students who spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians at some point during their entire career. The dates of the Cornell appointment or the year of the Ph.D. are provided as well as the title of the address presented at the congress. The names of plenary speakers appear emphasized.Some Cornell undergraduates are also included with their graduation year but it is likely that not all of them are listed at this time.

The Chicago Congress, 1893

  • Henry Turner Eddy (Ph.D. 1872) Modern Graphical methods

Toronto, 1924

  • John Irwin Hutchinson (Faculty 1896-1935) On the roots of the Riemann zeta function
  • George A. Miller (Faculty 1898-1901) Commutative conjugate cycles in subgroups of the holomorph of an Abelian group; History of several fundamental mathematical concepts
  • Harry Vandiver (Faculty 1919-1924) On the first case of Fermat's last theorem
  • William Lloyd Garrison Williams (Faculty 1920-1924) Formal modular invariants of forms in q variables
  • Henry L. Rietz (Ph.D. 1902) On a certain law of probability of Laplace
  • Charles H. Sisam (Ph.D. 1906) On surfaces whose asymptotic curves are cubics

Bologna, 1928

  • Virgil Snyder (Faculty 1895-1938) Involutorial space transformations contained multiply in a linear line complex
  • Louis Lazarus Silverman (Faculty 1910-1918)
  • Charles H. Sisam (Ph.D. 1906) On ruled three-dimensional varieties of order five

Zurich, 1932

  • H. C. Marston Morse (Faculty 1920-1925) The calculs of variation in the large
  • Virgil Snyder (Faculty 1895-1938) On a series of Cremona involutions defined by a pencil of ruled surfaces
  • Temple Rice Hollcroft (Ph.D. 1917) The general web of surfaces and the space involution defined by it

Oslo, 1936

  • William Feller (Faculty 1945-1950) Über die Theorie der stochastischen Prozesse
  • H. C. Marston Morse (Faculty 1920-1925) Functional Analysis in the Large
  • Virgil Snyder (Faculty 1895-1938) On a System of Involutorial Cremona Transformations Defined by a Pencil of Quadratic Surfaces
  • Charles Torrance (Ph.D. 1931) Tangent Lines and Planes in Topological Spaces

Cambridge, USA, 1950

  • H. C. Marston Morse (Faculty 1920-1925) Recent advances in variational theory in the large
  • Fritz Herzog (Faculty 1938-1943) Schlicht gap series whose convergence on the unit circle is uniform but not absolute

Amsterdam 1954

  • John Barkley Rosser (Faculty 1936-1963) The relative strength of Zermelo's set theory and Quine's new foundations

Edinburgh 1958

  • Kai Lai Chung (Faculty 1948-1952) Continuous parameter Markov chains
  • William Feller (Faculty 1945-1950) Some new connections between probability and classical analysis
  • Hsien-Chung Wang (Faculty 1966-1978) Some geometrical aspects of coset spaces of Lie groups

Stockholm 1962

  • Eugene B. Dynkin (Faculty 1975-2014) Markov processes and problems in analysis
  • Gilbert A. Hunt (Faculty 1949-1965) Transformation of Markoff processes.
  • Kiyoshi Ito (Faculty 1969-1975) The Brownian motion and tensor fields on Riemannian manifold Embedding smooth manifolds

Moscow 1966

  • William Browder (Faculty 1959-1964) Embedding smooth manifolds
  • Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar (Faculty 1956-1958) On the problem of resolution of singularities
  • David Henderson (Faculty 1966-present) An Infinite-dimensional compactum with no positive-dimensional compact subsets

Nice 1970

  • James Ax (Faculty 1962-1969) Transcendence and differential algebraic geometry
  • William Browder (Faculty 1959-1964) Manifolds and homotopy theory
  • Kai Lai Chung (Faculty 1948-1952) Boundary behavior of Markov chains and its contributions to general processes
  • Eugen B. Dynkin (Faculty 1975-2014) Entrance and exit spaces for a Markov process
  • Jame Eells (Faculty 1964-1969) On Fredholm manifolds
  • Walter Feit (Faculty 1953-1964) The current situation in the theory of finite simple groups
  • Peter Hilton (Faculty 1962-1971) Extensions of functors on groups and coefficients in a cohomology theory
  • Harry Kesten (Ph.D. 1958, Faculty 1961-present) Hitting of sets by processes with stationary independent increments
  • Jack Kiefer (Faculty 1952-1979) ) Optimum experimental designs
  • Gerald E. Sacks '58 (Ph.D. 1961, Faculty 1962-1966) Recursion in objects of finite type
  • Jacob Wolfowitz (Faculty 1951-1970) Asymptotically efficient tests and estimators

Vancouver 1974

  • James Bramble (Faculty 1968-present) Convergence in the Maximum Norm of Spline Approximations to Elliptic Boundary Value Problems
  • Eugen B. Dynkin (Faculty 1975-2014) Stochastic dynamic models of economic equilibrium
  • Moss Eisenberg Sweedler (Faculty 1967-present) Something Like the Brauer Group
  • Howard Garland (Faculty 1969-1971) On the Cohomology of Discrete Subgroups of p-Adic Groups
  • William Thurston (Faculty 2003-2012) On the Construction and Classification of Foliations
  • Anthony Knapp (Faulty 1969-1990) A Szegö Kernel for Discrete Series
  • Frank Spitzer (Faculty 1961-1992) Random Time Evolution of Infinite Particle Systems

Helsinki 1978

  • Robert Soare (Ph.D. 1967) Recursive enumerability
  • Kenneth S. Brown (Faculty 1971-present) Cohomology of infinite groups
  • Robert Connelly (Faculty 1977-present) Conjectures and open questions in rigidity
  • Allen E. Hatcher (Faculty 1983-present) Linearization in 3-dimensional topology
  • James West (Faculty 1976-present) Hilbert cube manifolds — meeting ground of geometric topology and absolute neighborhood retracts
  • Yulij Ilyashenko (Faculty 1996-present) Global and local aspects of the theory of complex differential equations

Warsaw 1983

  • Richard Shore (Faculty 1974-present) The degrees of unsolvability: the ordering of functions by relative computability
  • Harry Kesten (Ph.D. 1958, Faculty 1961-present) Percolation theory and resistance of random electrical networks
  • Nancy Koppel '63

Berkeley 1986

  • Richard Hamilton (Faculty 1966-1985) Parabolic equations in differential geometry
  • Charles J. Stone (Faculty 1962-1964) A nonparametric framework for statistical modelling
  • Louis de Branges (Ph.D. 1957) Underlying concepts in the proof of the Bieberbach conjecture
  • Clifford Taubes '75, Gauge Theories and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations

Kyoto 1990

  • Dan Barbasch (Faculty 1989-present) Unipotent Representations for Real Reductive Groups
  • Persi Diaconis (Faculty 1996-1998) Applications of Group Representations to Statistical Problems
  • Richard Durrett (Faculty 1985-2009) Stochastic Models of Growth and Competition
  • Philip Holmes (TAM Faculty 1984-1994) Turbulence, Dynamical Systems and the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Empirical Eigenfunctions
  • Yulij Ilyashenko (Faculty 1999-present) Finiteness Theorems for Limit Cycles
  • James Renegar (ORIE Faculty 1987-present) Computational Complexity of Solving Real Algebraic Formulae
  • Eva Tardos (CS Faculty 1985-present) Strongly Polynomial and Combinatorial Algorithms in Optimization

Zurich 1994

  • Clifford Taubes '75, Anti-self dual geometry

Berlin 1998

  • Maury Bramson (Ph.D. 1977) State Space Collapse for Queueing Networks
  • Persi Diaconis (Faculty 1996-1998) From Shuffling Cards to Walking Around the Building: An Introduction to Modern Markov Chain Theory
  • Iain Johnstone (Ph.D. 1981, Statistics) Oracle Inequalities and Nonparametric Function Estimation
  • Clifford Taubes '75, The Geometry of the Seiberg-Witten Invariants
  • Lloyd Nick Trefethen (CS Faculty 1991-1997) Schwarz--Christoffel Mapping in the Computer Era
  • Stephen Wainger (Faculty 1961-1966) Discrete Analogues of Singular and Maximal Radon Transforms

Beijing 2002

  • Lawrence Brown (Ph.D. 1964, Faculty 1966-74 and 1978-1994) Statistical Equivalence and Stochastic Process Limit Theorems
  • Harry Kesten (Ph.D. 1958, Faculty 1961-present) Some Highlights of Percolation
  • Nancy Koppel '63, Rhythms of the Nervous System: Mathematical Themes and Variations
  • Gregory Lawler (Faculty) Conformal Invariance, Universality, and the Dimension of the Brownian Frontier
  • John Smillie (Faculty 1987-present) Dynamics in Two Complex Dimensions
  • Harold Widom (Faculty 1955-1968) Distribution Functions for Largest Eigenvalues and Their Applications

Madrid 2006

  • Martin Bridson (Ph.D. 1991) Non-positive curvature and complexity for finitely presented groups
  • Robert Ghrist (CAM Ph.D. 1995) Braids and differential equations
  • Richard Hamilton (Faculty 1966-1985)
  • Iain Johnstone (Ph.D. 1981, Statistics) High dimensional statistical inference and random matrices
  • Jon Kleinberg '93 (CS Faculty 1996-present) Complex networks and decentralized search algorithms
  • Tim Roughgarden (Ph.D. 2002, Computer Science) Potential functions and the inefficiency of equilibria
  • Birgit Speh (Faculty 1980-present) Representation theory and the cohomology of arithmetic groups
  • Karen Vogtmann (Faculty 1985-present) The cohomology of automorphism groups of free groups

Hyderabad 2010

  • Louis Billera (ORIE and Faculty 1973-present) Flag Enumeration in Polytopes, Eulerian Partially Ordered Sets and Coxeter Groups
  • Justin Moore (Faculty 2007-present) The Proper Forcing Axiom
  • Fernando Codá Marques (Ph.D. 2003) Scalar Curvature, Conformal Geometry, and the Ricci Flow with Surgery
  • Claudia Neuhauser (Ph.D. 1990) Coevolution in Spatial Habitats

Seoul 2014

  • Fernando Codá Marques (Ph.D. 2003) Minimal surfaces - variational theory and applications
  • Benson Farb '89, Representation Stability
  • Mark Gross '84 (Faculty 1993-2002) Local mirror symmetry in the tropics
  • Martin Kassabov (Faculty 2004-present) Finitely generated groups with controlled pro-algebraic completions
  • Adrian Lewis (ORIE Faculty 2004-present) Nonsmooth optimization: conditioning, convergence, and semi-algebraic models
  • Antonio Montalban (Ph.D. 2004) Computability theoretic classifications for classes of structures
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