In Memoriam: Greg Hjorth, Professor of Mathematics, 1963 – 2011

Professor Greg Hjorth died of a heart attack in his birth city of Melbourne, Australia, on Jan. 13. He was 47. Hjorth was recognized as a young chess whiz in his primary school years. He quickly advanced to tournament chess, becoming joint Commonwealth Champion in 1983 and earning his International Master title in 1984. He played Garry Kasparov, among other accomplished chess rivals, but took his own later advice that “if you’re not in the top 100 by 21, get out.” Hjorth’s passion for chess played over to mathematical logic, a field that saw him reach great heights with high academic honors and wide recognition. After receiving his undergraduate degree in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Hjorth continued his studies at UC Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in mathematics under the supervision of Hugh Woodin in 1993. As a graduate student, Hjorth was recognized for his exceptional talent, and his brilliant thesis was awarded the first Sacks Prize in 1994 by the Association for Symbolic Logic for his research in descriptive set theory and its surprising consequences concerning the relationship between projective sets and large cardinals. Hjorth pursued his postdoctoral studies at Caltech for two years then joined the mathematics faculty at UCLA in 1995, where he was made full professor in 2001. Since 2006, he spent two quarters of each year at the University of Melbourne appointed to a prestigious Australian Research Council professorial fellowship.

Over his 16 years at UCLA, Hjorth has been acknowledged as a world leader in the field of mathematical logic and its applications to other fields of mathematics. He has made a series of stunning and far-reaching contributions, in particular to ergodic theory and orbit equivalence of group actions. These included the development of entirely new theories, including what is now called Hjorth’s theory of turbulence, which has had a major impact on contemporary work in set theory and its applications. Hjorth was known as a brilliant problem solver, having been able to achieve major breakthroughs in problems that were previously considered intractable, including his remarkable work on the famous topological Vaught Conjecture and most recently, his results on the incomparability of treeable equivalence relations. His work consistently amazed his colleagues with its uncanny originality and technical wizardry and has been recognized by many honors, including a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1997, an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998, the ASL Karp Prize in 2003 (joint with Alexander Kechris), and last year, an invitation to deliver one of the major lecture series in logic, the Alfred Tarski Lectures at UC Berkeley. Hjorth supervised eight Ph.D. students at UCLA, including the 2008 UCLA Math Ph.D. Inessa Epstein, who also received the prestigious Sacks prize.

Hjorth will be richly remembered by fellow colleagues as a brilliant mathematician in constant pursuit of solutions to intractable problems, and as a committed and caring teacher. He is survived by his parents Noela and Robert, and his sister Larissa. 

In Memoriam: Geoffrey Mess

Geoffrey Mess, a mathematics professor at UCLA, died on August 8th, 2014.

Following the completion of a brilliant Ph.D. thesis at UC Berkeley on Torelli subgroups of mapping class groups, Geoffrey Mess joined the UCLA Mathematics Department as a Hedrick Assistant Professor, a visiting position reserved for top young PhDs from around the world.  He joined the regular faculty in 1988 as an Assistant Professor. He rose to prominence in the areas of topology and geometric group theory by making a number of deep contributions to these fields.  He laid the basis for the solution of the Seifert conjecture by Casson and Gabai. His joint work with Bestvina on torsion-free Gromov hyperbolic groups has produced what is now known as the Bestvina-Mess formula relating the cohomological dimension of such a group to that of its boundary. Another of his celebrated results, on symmetries of Lorentz spacetimes of constant curvature, is a theorem that bears his name.  Mess was awarded a Sloan research fellowship in 1990, and promoted to Associate Professor in 1992.  He left a legacy of seven graduate students who have completed their PhDs under his supervision at UCLA: Emily Hamilton (1995), Iakovos Iliadis (1994), Havrenik Mherian (1990), Maria Morrill (1996), Eleanor Rieffel (1993), Kevin Scannell (1996) and William Sherman (1993).  

Geoffrey Mess was born in Montreal on February 19th, 1960 to Annette and David Mess.  He entered the University of Waterloo at age 16, graduating with a Bachelor’s in Mathematics in 1980.  Geoff’s doctoral thesis was supervised by Andrew J. Casson and John R. Stallings, Jr. Geoff leaves behind a brother, Derek Mess, and a nephew, Dylan Mess, both of Cambridge, MA.

Beyond mathematics, Geoff’s interests included physics, world history, languages, kayaking, hiking, and backpacking. He hiked Vermont’s Long Trail, as well as hundreds of miles in the Sawtooth Mountains and the Canadian Rockies.

Geoffrey Mess battled illness for much of the past 20 years.  The illness stole away his research productivity first and then succeeded in stealing him from us.  He will be remembered and missed.

View Goeffrey Mess’ Full Obituary in the Daily Bruin here.

In Memoriam: David G. Cantor, Professor of Mathematics, 1935 – 2012

Professor Emeritus David G. Cantor passed away on November 19, 2012. After completing undergraduate work at the California Institute of Technology in 1956, he received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1960 under the combined direction of Basil Gordon and Ernst Straus. He held an instructorship at Princeton University (1960-62), followed by an Assistant Professor position at the University of Washington (1962-64).

Professor Cantor came to UCLA in 1964 with an appointment in the Department of Mathematics and a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science Department. Over the years he advised a number of Ph.D. students while also contributing greatly to the development of computing capabilities in the Department of Mathematics. He retired from UCLA in 1991 and thereafter was a researcher at the Center for Communications Research in La Jolla, CA.

His distinction in number theory and combinatorics was recognized by a number of awards, including the (honorary) NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1960 and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1968; and, most recently, by his selection as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

At the time of his passing, he was 77. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him.

Profs. Wotao Yin and Mason Porter named among the most influential researchers in the world

Profs. Yin and Porter

Thirty-seven UCLA scholars have been named as the world’s most influential scientific researcher. This annual list of the most highly cited researchers is compiled by the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate using data based on scholarly publication counts and citation indexes. The selected researchers wrote publications that ranked in the top 1% by citations in their field for that year, according to the Web of Science citation index.

Wotao Yin and Mason Porter, applied mathematicians and professors within the Department of Mathematics, have been named among 2020’s UCLA scholars listed. Yin is best known for co-inventing fast algorithms for sparse optimization and distributed optimization. Currently, he is working on optimization algorithms for noncovex and large-scale problems. Porter works in diverse topics — encompassing theory, computation, and applications — in networks, complex systems, and nonlinear systems.

To read the full UCLA Newsroom article, click here.

In Memoriam: A.V. Balakrishnan

A.V. Balakrishnan, distinguished professor emeritus and research professor of electrical engineering, passed away Tuesday morning, March 17. Bal, as he was known to everyone, was a member of the UCLA faculty for more than 50 years. Bal grew up in Chennai, India. He earned his B.Sc. and an M.A. from the University of Madras. After moving to the U.S., he earned an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1950, and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1954, both from USC. Following his Ph.D., Bal was a project engineer at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), taught at USC and UCLA; and was a researcher at Space Technology Laboratories in Redondo Beach. He joined UCLA Engineering at the associate professor level in 1961. Over Bal’s long and distinguished career here, he supervised 54 master’s students; 18 Engineer degree recipients and 54 Ph.D. graduates, many of whom went on to careers in academia and industry. And he was the author of two books. Bal was a teacher and scholar of the highest order. He published singled authored papers while encouraging his students to publish their work under their own names. Twice he served as chair of the Department of Systems Science. He also held an appointment in Mathematics. For several years, he was the director of the Flight Systems Laboratory at UCLA that was supported by NASA. Bal was named a Fellow of IEEE in 1966 and a Life Fellow in 1996. He received the NASA Public Service Medal in 1996; the Richard E. Bellman Award in 2001 from the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) for distinguished achievements in control theory; and the Distinguished Alumni Award in Academia from USC Viterbi in 2004. Bal had a highly distinguished career here at the school, teaching thousands of students stochastic processes, linear systems, and optimal control. He will be missed.