Prof. Speck Awarded Chancellor’s Research Award
At the 2026 Fall Faculty Assembly, Prof. Jared Speck was awarded a Chancellor‘s Research Award. This is one of the highest honors that the University can bestow for research. The award recognizes the paper “Stable big bang formation for Einstein’s equations: the complete sub-critical regime,” written with Grigorios Fournodavlos (U Crete) and Igor Rodnianski (Princeton), This paper was published in 2020 by the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (JAMS), one of the top three journals in mathematics.
Speck’s work rigorously addresses a 50-year old theory regarding perfect symmetry assumptions about the universe. In short, the paper is a celebrated research breakthrough on a theory of the big bang without symmetry assumptions. In technical terms, they show that generalized Kasner solutions to the Einstein equations all develop a big bang singularity as times goes to zero. As Chancellor Diermeier summarized, “the Big Bang isn’t just a mathematical assumption.”
Congratulations, Jared!