Medal recognises research achievement and support for mathematics

The University of Adelaide’s Professor Mathai Varghese FAA from the School of Mathematical Sciences, has today Tuesday, 7 December, been awarded the George Szekeres Medal by the Australian Mathematical Society.

The George Szekeres Medal is the society’s most prestigious medal, recognising research achievement and an outstanding record of promoting and supporting the discipline.

Mathai Varghese is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Elder Professor of Mathematics and Australian Laureate Fellow.

Since 2009, he has been Director of the Institute for Geometry and its Applications at the University of Adelaide. Since joining the University 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.

Mathai is renowned for his co-invention of Projective and Fractional Index Theory, which has been generalised to certain infinite dimensional manifolds and for the Mathai-Quillen formalism in Index theory and topological field theories.

He is also renowned for his research in String Theory, T-duality in a background flux with a change of topology and novel applications to condensed matter physics.

Mathai has held the position of Vice-President (Annual Conferences) of AustMS, supervised ten PhD students and ten masters students to completion and mentored fifteen postdoctoral fellows.

In early 2021 Mathai was awarded the Hannan medal from the Australian Academy of Science.