Mathematician receives grant

IU mathematician Nets Katz was named a recipient of a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

There are 180 fellowships in total, and this year marks the 88th anniversary of the competition in the United States and Canada. Katz was selected from a group of nearly 3,000 applicants.

“This is a terrific honor for Nets, and most well-deserved,” Mathematics Department

Chair Kevin Zumbrun said in a press release. “This caps a year in which he and co-authors not only solved the long-standing Erdös distance problem, but he also obtained the best-known bounds for the cap set problem.”
Nets is best known among his colleagues for his original methodology when analyzing new problems.

“To Nets’ colleagues, this remarkable success confirms what we have observed at close hand over a long period of time,” Zumbrun said. “Nets is one of the most original and talented analysts around. He works on extraordinarily difficult problems, and he solves them more often than not.”

The mathematician will travel to Cambridge University with the help of his new $45,000 grant to work with mathematics professor Ben Green, who — like Katz — specializes in combinatorics.

“We now give 180 fellowships in some 78 fields, including such disciplines as computer science, astrophysics and African studies. But, to me, the most significant thing about the foundation may be the continuity of our mission, a commitment to funding individuals at the highest level to do the work they were meant to do,” Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch said in a press release.

\“We don’t support groups or organizations. We have always bet everything on the individual, which seems to me increasingly rare in a corporatized
America.”

— Michael Majchrowicz