The Clay Research Award for Jeremy Kahn and Vladimir Markovic:
For their work showing that a closed hypebolic three manifold has an essential immersed hyperbolic Riemann surface, i.e., the map on fundamental groups is injective.
And for their solution of the Ehrenpreis conjecture: that given any two compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces, there are finite covers of the two surfaces which are arbitrarily close in the Teichmuller metric.
The awards will be presented at the 2012 Clay Research Conference, to be held June 18-19 at Oxford University in Martin Wood Lecture Theatre of the Physics Department. Both Kahn and Markovic will speak on their work at that occasion. Other confirmed speakers are: Artur Avila (IMPA/CNRS); Francis Brown (CNRS); Stavros Garoufalidis (GeorgiaTech); Jeremy Kahn (Brown); Marc Lackenby (Oxford); Vladimir Markovic (Caltech); Peter Scholze (Univ. of Bonn). Registration is free but strongly recommended.