Svetlana Jitomirskaya, Distinguished Professor of mathematics at the University of California, Irvine, has been named the 2020 winner of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. She is only the second woman to receive the annual prize – and the first to receive it alone, not jointly.
Established in 1959 by the Heineman Foundation for Research, Educational, Charitable and Scientific Purposes Inc., the prize is administered jointly by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. The citation for this year’s prize states that Professor Jitomirskaya was recognized “for work on the spectral theory of almost- periodic Schrödinger operators and related questions in dynamical systems.”
“To say I am honored and humbled to receive this prize – to now be on the same list with so many of my absolute heroes – is a huge understatement,” Professor Jitomirskaya said. “The prize is relatively rarely given to pure mathematicians like me; I see it as an indication of the physics community’s growing interest in the questions I’ve been working on – and perhaps math in general.”
Dr. Jitomirskaya attended Russia’s Moscow State University, earning an undergraduate degree in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1991, both in mathematics. She became a part-time lecturer at the University of California, Irvine in 1991 and has been professionally affiliated with the university since that time.