Vaughan Jones Elected Vice President of the IMU
Stevenson Distinguished Professor Vaughan Jones has been elected a Vice President of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). He will serve a four-year term beginning in January 2015.
The IMU is an international non-governmental and non-profit scientific organization with the purpose of promoting international cooperation in mathematics. One of its key functions is to support international scientific meetings, especially the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which meets every four years.
The IMU is also renowned as the organization that awards the Fields Medal at the opening ceremony of each ICM meeting. The Fields Medal is considered the highest honor a mathematician can receive. It is often described as ??the Nobel Prize of mathematics.?
Jones himself is a Fields Medalist, having received the award in 1990, and holds many other awards in recognition of his contributions to mathematics. He is especially recognized for his work in the area of von Neumann algebras and knot theory. Jones joined the Vanderbilt Department of Mathematics in fall 2011.
The IMU Executive Committee is comprised of four officers and seven at-large members. Jones and the other members of the 2015-2018 Executive Committee were elected by the IMU General Assembly at its meeting in Gyeongju, South Korea, in August 2014.
(For a profile of Jones and his career, see page 3 of the Fall 2012 issue of Spectrum, the Department of Mathematics newsletter.)