LSU Mathematics Professor Pramod Achar has been elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for the Class of 2020. Fellows receive the honor for their “outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.” He was nominated for his contributions to geometric and modular representation theory. This includes joint work with Shotaro Makisumi (Columbia University), Simon Riche (Université Clermont Auvergne, France), and Geordie Williamson (University of Sydney, Australia) on the eigenvalues of operators that arise in representations of reductive groups.
Dr. Achar came to LSU in 2004 as an assistant professor after a position as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Achar received both his Bachelors and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) where his mentor and Ph.D. advisor David Vogan encouraged his application to LSU. Dr. Achar says that he is grateful for the supportive academic environment of LSU, which he attributes to a favorable balance between instruction duties and research opportunities so that he is able to both expand the boundaries of his own research and positively affect the research of colleagues and LSU graduate students during his career.
Dr. Achar considers it a great honor to have his work recognized by being elected a Fellow of the AMS, and he is especially appreciative of those who nominated him for this distinction. He wishes to make a positive impact on future mathematicians by mentoring and encouraging the research of graduate and undergraduate students in mathematics by encouraging broad knowledge, saying, “It can be enriching to have exposure in subjects that are outside one’s expertise”. Dr. Achar became interested in mathematics as a high school student who enrolled in a reading course at Rhodes College, Memphis on topology during which he came to understand that “mathematics involved creativity, imagination, and intuition and was not just about solving equations”, and that communication is an important part of learning and teaching mathematics.
Dr. Achar has been a member of the American Mathematical Society since 1998 and serves on the AMS- Simons Travel Grants committee from 2017 to 2020. He presently sits on the editorial board of two academic journals, Representation Theory, and Algebras and Representation Theory. He is also jointly organizing a conference with Australian researchers for February 2020 on New Connections in Representation Theory located in Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia sponsored by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) and the Australian Mathematical Society (AUST MS).
This year, the AMS elected 52 new Fellows.
(Contact: Jolie Cornay; Photo: Bogdan Oporowski)