Two Women Academics Named Recipients of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize

Every two years, the Schock Foundation, in partnership with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, have presented the Rolf Schock Prize to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to logic and philosophy, mathematics, visual arts, and music, respectively. This year’s cohort included two women recipients with ties to academia.

Irene Heim, professor emerita of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named a co-recipient of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. She shares the award with, Hans Kamp, professor at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. The pair were honored for their mutually independent “conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”

Dr. Heim joined the MIT faculty in 1989, and has since served as chair of the linguistics section and head of the department of linguistics and philosophy. Earlier in her career, she taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her academic work has centered around syntax and semantics. She is the co-author of Semantics in Generative Grammar (Wiley-Blackwell, 1998).

Dr. Heim holds a master’s degree in linguistics and philosophy from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, She earned Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Lai-Sang Young, the Henry & Lucy Moses Professor of Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, has received the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics. She was recognized for her “long-lasting and deep contribution to the theory of non-uniformly hyperbolic dynamical systems.”

Dr. Young has served as the Moses Professor at NYU for the past 25 years. She also serves as a professor of mathematics and neural science at NYU and as a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She previously taught at Northwestern University, Michigan State University, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work on dynamical systems has primarily focused on chaotic systems. Recently, she has expanded her research to include theoretical neuroscience.

Dr. Young is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she majored in mathematics. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.