Ruth I. Michler Prize 2012-2013

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and Cornell University are pleased to announce that Ling Long, Iowa State University, will receive the 2012-13 Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize. The Michler Prize grants a mid-career woman in academia a residential fellowship in the Cornell University mathematics department without teaching obligations. This pioneering venture was established through a very generous donation from the Michler family and the efforts of many people at AWM and Cornell.

Ling Long was selected to receive the Michler Prize because of her wide range of mathematical talents. In 1997 she earned a B.Sc. from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, majoring in mathematics with a minor in computer science and engineering. Long received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) in 2002. She studied modularity of elliptic surfaces under the direction of Wen-Ching Winnie Li from PSU and Noriko Yui from Queen’s University.Before coming to the Iowa State University in 2003, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Long spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Long’s research involves modular forms for finite index subgroups of the modular group. These groups play an important role in Grothendieck’s program of dessins d’enfants (children’s drawings. Her work is partially funded by the National Science Foundation
At Cornell, Long plans to work with Ravi Ramakishna on Galois representations attached to noncongruence modular forms based on the pioneering work of Anthony Scholl and her joint work with Oliver Atkin, Winnie Li, and Tong Liu. The Langlands philosophy predicts that the L-functions of these Galois representations should be expressible in terms of L-functions of automorphic forms. Such a connection has far-reaching impacts on the arithmetic of modular forms. Long also looks forward to potential collaborations with other faculty members at Cornell.