UCSB mathematics professor James McKernan swept up a distinguished honor this week, taking one of the three annually presented Clay Research Awards. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Clay Mathematics Institute bestowed its most visible respect upon McKernan and his co-researcher, Christopher Hacon, an associate professor at the University of Utah. The two were recognized for contributing to the understanding of “birational geometry of algebraic varieties in dimension greater than three, in particular, for their inductive proof of the existence of flips” – an accomplishment perhaps a little out of the layperson’s understanding, but well within a mathematician’s bragging rights.

Kaitlin Pike is an Independent intern.

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