Sergei Starchenko, a professor of mathematics at the University of Notre Dame, will speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians, to be held Aug. 19 to 27 in Hyderabad, India.
Starchenko and his colleague, Ya′acov Peterzil of the University of Haifa in Israel, received a joint invitation to speak at the prestigious congress that meets every four years under the auspices of the International Mathematical Union. They will discuss their research on o-minimality, a model theoretic framework for tame geometry that they use to investigate properties of complex analytic sets.
Starchenko, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1997, is interested primarily in applications of logic, specifically model theory, to real analytic geometry, geometric measure theory, asymptotic analysis and questions of differentiability and analyticity of real functions. His research involves studying sets and functions that are definable in “well-behaved” (e.g., o-minimal) first-order structures on the field of real numbers.
The International Congress of Mathematicians includes the presentation of some of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, including the Fields Medal, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics.” An invitation to be a speaker at the Congress is considered a great honor. In addition to Starchenko, six other Notre Dame mathematicians have been invited speakers at the Congress: Karsten Grove, Francois Ledrappier, Stephan Stolz, Bill Dwyer, Matt Gursky and Xiaobo Liu.