Gunther Uhlmann and Cynthia Vinzant received the Frontiers of Science Award at the inaugural International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) held in Beijing this July under the theme of "Advancing Science for Humanity." The Congress focuses on three branches of basic science: mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer and information sciences. This will be an annual conference funded and hosted by the Beijing City government as part of an effort to strongly support and promote basic research in the sciences worldwide.
The winning papers were "Log-concave polynomials, I: Entropy and a deterministic approximation algorithm for counting bases of matroids" from the Duke Mathematical Journal (2021) co-authored by Nima Anari (Stanford University), Shayan Oveis Gharan (University of Washington), and Cynthia Vinzant (University of Washington); and "Local and global boundary rigidity and the geodesic X-ray transform in the normal gauge" from the Annals of Mathematics (2021) co-authored by Plamen Stefanov (Purdue University), Gunther Uhlmann (University of Washington), and András Vasy (Stanford University).