Phillip Griffiths, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, has been awarded the Chern Medal by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) at the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Seoul, South Korea. For full story, see this Wednesday’s Town Topics.

The Chern Medal, established in 2010 in honor of mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern (1911–2004), is awarded every four years in recognition of outstanding and sustained achievements in the field. Griffiths, whose work has stimulated a wide range of advances in mathematics over the past 50 years, was cited by the IMU, the global mathematics professional organization, for his “groundbreaking and transformative development of transcendental methods in complex geometry, particularly his seminal work in Hodge theory and periods of algebraic varieties.” Of the $500,000 monetary award, half will be donated to support the African Mathematics Millennium Science Initiative (AMMSI), which is a distributed network of mathematics research, training and promotion throughout Africa.