Sid Webster will share the 2001 Stefan Bergman Trust Prize with Laszlo Lempert of Purdue University. The Bergman Trust was established in 1988, and recognizes mathematical accomplishments in the areas of research in which Stefan Bergman worked. For two years, each will receive half the income from the trust, which is currently about $26,000 per year.
The selection committee cited Webster's work in three areas. The first was his use of the Bergman kernel function in extending work of Fefferman on boundary smoothness of biholomorphic maps from domains which are strictly pseudoconvex to weakly pseudoconvex domains. The second was his use of Chern-Moser invariants of CR manifolds to study proper holomorphic mappings between complex balls of different dimensions, and biholomorphic maps between ellipsoids. The third was his contribution to the understanding of the local embedding problem for strictly pseudoconvex CR manifolds.
Webster has been at the University of Chicago since 1989. He received his Ph.D. under the direction of S.S. Chern from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. Stefan Bergman was best known for his work in several complex variables. He was at Stanford University for many years, and died in 1977 at the age of eighty-two. The prize was established by a gift from his wife.
Further information can be found in the October 2001 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.