Lifetime of mathematical achievement recognised

The University of Adelaide’s Professor Mathai Varghese FAA has been awarded the prestigious Hannan Medal by the Australian Academy of Science for his career-long outstanding contributions in the field of geometric analysis.

Professor Varghese is Elder Professor of Mathematics and Australian Laureate Fellow in the School of Mathematical Sciences. Since 2009, he has been Director of the Institute for Geometry and its Applications at Adelaide. Since joining the University of Adelaide in 1989 he has held various ARC Postdoctoral positions and was appointed Professor of Pure Mathematics in 2006 and the Elder Chair in Mathematics in 2013. He completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 and was a postdoctoral researcher (Dickson Instructor) at the University of Chicago.

Professor Varghese is renowned internationally for his research. He has published over 100 scientific articles in scholarly journals and has been awarded many ARC awards (Large Grants, Discovery Projects and Fellowships).

The quality of Professor Varghese’s research has been recognised with awards over the years including the Australian Mathematical Society medal in 2000, election as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2011 and the prestigious Australian Laureate Fellowship (2018-2022).

The Hannan Medal is a career award that recognises outstanding research in any of the fields of statistical science, pure mathematics, applied mathematics and computational mathematics and is made in one of those three areas in turn at two-yearly intervals.

The Academy's partial citation for Professor Varghese's Hannan Medal focuses on his contributions to geometric analysis: Professor Varghese has made highly influential contributions to the field of geometric analysis, which relates geometric, analytic and algebraic properties of (possibly infinite dimensional) manifolds. Among these are his co-inventions of Fractional Index Theory and Projective Index Theory that have received international recognition for explaining the mystery of the analytic counterpart of the A-hat genus. His recent joint work extending the Fractional Index Theorem to infinite dimensional loop spaces is itself of immense significance.