Romanian Ciprian Manolescu, a professor of mathematics at UCLA, in United States, was awarded the 2019 E. H. Moore Research Article Prize by the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

The Moore Prize is awarded for an outstanding research article that appeared in one of the AMS primary research journals. The prize is awarded every three years and its current amount stands at USD 5,000.

Manolescu received the prize for the paper “Pin(2)-equivariant Seiberg-Witten Floer homology and the triangulation conjecture,” published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. The paper resolves the Triangulation Conjecture, “showing that there are topological manifolds that do not admit a simplicial triangulation in each dimension greater than 4,” according to an UCLA news post.

Topology is an area of Mathematics concerned with the properties of space that are preserved under continuous deformations.

"I feel very honored to receive the E. H. Moore Research Article Prize from the AMS. The main result of the paper is the existence of non-triangulable manifolds in dimensions at least five. In principle a low-dimensional topologist like me could have no hope of proving such a result. Luckily, in the 1970s, David Galewski, Ron Stern and Takao Matumoto managed to reduce this statement to a conjecture about the homology cobordism group in dimension three, and this is the conjecture I proved. They deserve more than half of the credit for the final theorem," Manolescu said.

Manolescu was born in 1978 in Romania, in Alexandria. He holds dual citizenship, Romanian and US. He did his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, from where he also earned his Ph.D in 2004. He held appointments at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Cambridge, before joining UCLA, where he is now a professor.

He was previously awarded the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize and a Clay Research Fellowship. He is also the recipient of the 2012 European Mathematical Society Prize and the 2011 Robert Sorgenfrey Distinguished Teaching Award.

While he was a Harvard undergraduate, he took part in the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, ranking among the top five students three times. The competition doesn’t publish a ranking of the top 5 students. Described by UCLA as “a Putnam legend,” Manolescu coached UCLA’s team of students participating in the competition. He is also a Doctor Honoris Causa of the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj Napoca. His detailed CV is available here.

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(Photo: Reed Hutchinson/UCLA at newsroom.ucla.edu)

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