André Lichnerowicz prize in Poisson Geometry - 2012

The Prize
The André Lichnerowicz prize in Poisson geometry was established in 2008. It is awarded for notable contributions to Poisson geometry, every two years at the "International Conference on Poisson Geometry in Mathematics and Physics", to researchers who completed their doctorates at most eight years before the year of the Conference.

The prize is named in memory of André Lichnerowicz (1915-1998) whose work was fundamental in establishing Poisson geometry as a branch of mathematics. It is awarded by a jury composed of the members of the scientific and advisory committees of the conference. The 2012 Lichnerowicz prize is sponsored by the Koninklijk Wiskundig Genootschap (the Royal (Dutch) Mathematical Society), through the mathematics journal of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), Indagationes Mathematicae.

The Winner
The recipient of the 2012 André Lichnerowicz prize in Poisson geometry is:

Thomas Willwacher (Harvard University)

Thomas Willwacher completed his Ph.D. in 2009 at the ETH Zürich, under the supervision of Giovanni Felder. His thesis, titled 'Cyclic formality', earned him the 2010 ETH medal for outstanding dissertation. He subsequently took on a position at Harvard University, as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows.

Willwacher has made deep and fundamental contributions to Poisson geometry, combining techniques from quantum field theory, homological algebra, and graph complexes. His results include proofs of Kontsevich's cyclic formality conjecture for cochains and Tsygan's cyclic formality conjecture for chains. Together with Severa, he established the homotopy equivalence between Kontsevich's and Tamarkin's formalities of the little disk operad. More recently, he proved that the cohomology of the Kontsevich graph complex is isomorphic to the Grothendieck-Teichmueller Lie algebra.

Previous Years
The 2008 prize announcement was made at the EPFL in Lausanne, the 2010 prize announcement was made at the IMPA in Rio de Janeiro.