The Polya Prize, established in 1969, is awarded in 1994 for a notable application of combinatorial theory made during the five to ten years preceding the award.
The 1994 recipients are Harry Kesten, Cornell University, and Gregory Chudnovsky, Columbia University.
Harry Kesten, Department of Mathematics, Cornell University
Harry Kesten obtained his Ph.D. at Cornell University under the guidance of Mark Kac. Since 1962 he has been a regular faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at Cornell. Before that he had taught at Princeton University and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Professor Kesten has many times been invited to give special lectures both in the U.S. and abroad; he is a Guggenheim Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and on the editorial boards of several mathematical publications. He has received distinguished honors like the Brouwer Memorial Lecture and Medal, and the Correspondent Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Professor Kesten's mathematical interests have been almost entirely in probability theory, in particular in random walk, and in models inspired by statistical mechanics.
Gregory V. Chudnovsky, Department of Mathematics, Columbia University
Gregory V. Chudnovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine. In 1975 he obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; Maitre de Conference, Paris University, 1977-78; and Maitre de Recherche, CNRS Paris, France, 1979-81. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1978 and became a U.S. citizen. Dr. Chudnovsky has been a research scientist at Columbia University since 1978. He is an author and editor of books in number theory, computer algebra, and mathematical physics. Among the many honors and awards that he has received are the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize, Peccot-Vimont Prize - College de France, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Dr. Chudnovsky's current fields of research interest include: computational number theory, high-performance computing and computing architecture, computer algebra, approximation methods, and inverse methods in mathematical physics.