Awards at the Logic Colloquium

Julia F. KnightThe Association for Symbolic Logic presents two of its major awards at this year’s Logic Colloquium at the Vienna Summer of Logic.

The Karp Prize, named for Carol Karp, is awarded every five years for connected body of research, most of which has been completed in the time since the previous prize was awarded. The 2013 Karp Prize is shared between Moti Gitik (Tel Aviv University), Ya’acov Peterzil, (University of Haifa), Jonathan Pila (University of Oxford), Sergei Starchenko (University of Notre Dame), and Alex Wilkie (University of Manchester).

Moti Gitik is being honored for his definitive work on the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis. His earlier work determined the exact consistency strength of the failure of the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis. His deep understanding led to a counterexample to the PCF conjecture, for which he is being awarded his share of the Karp prize. Matt Foreman will discuss Gitik’s work at 3 pm on Saturday.

Kobi Peterzil, Jonathan Pila, Sergei Starchenko, and Alex Wilkie shared the other half of the 2013 Karp Prize for their efforts in turning the theory of o-minimality into a sharp tool for attacking conjectures in number theory, which culminated in the solution of important special cases of the André-Oort Conjecture by Pila. The award lecture was given by Matthias Aschenbrenner on Tuesday, his slides are online.

The Gödel Lecture is an invited address delivered each year, alternating between the ASL Annual Meeting and the Logic Colloquium. The ASL Committee on Prizes and Awards is charged with selecting the Gödel Lecturer based on outstanding contributions to logic through research and scholarship.

The 2014 Gödel Lecturer is Julia F. Knight (Notre Dame University). She is being honored for her work on model theory and recursion theory. Julia Knight has been among the main contributors, if not the main one, to the area of computable structure theory. Her work continues to be extremely influential in the area. She is also well-known for her theorems on the upward closure of degree spectra of non-trivial structures. Her work with Ash and Slaman on generic copies of structures became a standard tool that has been used to solve a whole variety of problems.
Knight will speak at 5:30 pm on Saturday.