Mathematics professor receives the prestigious G. de B Robinson Award

Patrick Ingram, an associate professor of mathematics in the Faculty of Science at York University has been awarded the prestigious G. de B. Robinson Award for his paper titled “Rigidity and height bounds for certain post-critically finite endomorphisms of PN.” The award is presented by the Canadian Mathematical Society.

Patrick Ingram

The high relevance of Ingram’s paper comes from being the first published work describing the arithmetic of post-critically finite self-maps for higher dimensional spaces. This paper opens new avenues for research, due to the importance of the dynamical behaviour of the critical locus for endomorphisms of PN. For example, the role post-critically finite rational functions play within the appropriate moduli space of dynamical systems is like that played by the CM points on the affine j-line for elliptic curves.

In 2006 Ingram completed his PhD at University of British Columbia under the supervision of Michael Bennett. After being an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (2006-2008) and a Brookfield Research Professor at the University of Waterloo (2008-2011), Ingram became an assistant professor at Colorado State University. In 2016, he returned to Canada, where he is currently an associate professor of mathematics at York University.

The G. de B. Robinson is usually given to one outstanding paper published in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics or the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin. The G. de B. Robinson Award is named for Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson, the third president of the CMS. Robinson, along with H.S.M. Coxeter, established the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and acted as the managing editor for 30 years. In exceptional circumstances, the awards committee can offer more awards (up to three per year). This year, the selection committee had several outstanding papers to assess and eventually decided to offer two awards. The other recipient is Anastasia Stavrova, a senior researcher at St. Petersburg State University in Russia, for her paper titled “Non-stable K1-functors for Multiloop Groups.”