This award supports the research in Algebraic Geometry of Professor Janos Kollar of the University of Utah. Dr Kollar plans to work in the rapidly developing field of minimal models for threefolds and algebraic varieties of higher dimension than three. He will also use the new results of Mori on minimal models to look for new applications in the theory of algebraic surfaces and the deformation theory of surface singularities. This is research in the field of Algebraic Geometry, one of the oldest parts of modern mathematics, but one which has had a revolutionary flowering in the past quarter-century. In its origin, it treated figures that could be defined in the plane by the simplest equations, namely polynomials. Nowadays the field makes use of methods not only from Algebra, but from Analysis and Topology, and conversely is finding application in those fields as well as in theoretical Computer Science and in Robotics.
