John Voight, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at UVM received the Selfridge Prize for the best paper presented during the Ninth Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (ANTS IX) held July 19-23, 2010 at INRIA in Nancy, France. Voight, in recognition for his paper entitled, "Computing automorphic forms on Shimura curves over fields with arbitrary class number" (see abstract below), received a prestigious medal and a cash award.

The Selfridge prize honors John Selfridge for his many contributions to mathematics and is awarded every two years at ANTS, the premier international forum for presentations on new research in computational number theory. The award is sponsored by the Number Theory Foundation.

"Voight’s research reflects just some of the incredible work recognized internationally by many of our younger faculty members," says Bernard "Chip" Cole, Interim Dean of the UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences.

Voight’s primary research area is in number theory, specifically arithmetic algebraic geometry. He received a three-year $75,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Mathematical Sciences Award for his research entitled, "Quaternion algebras, Shimura curves, and modular forms: Algorithms and arithmetic." This grant is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Voight also received a two-year $30,000 Young Investigator Grant from the National Security Agency (NSA) for research entitled, "Topics in number theory: Geometry, cohomology and algorithms".

For more information on ANTS visit: http://www.ants9.org/

To read the paper visit: http://www.cems.uvm.edu/~voight/articles/classno-ants-032510.pdf

Abstract We extend methods of Greenberg and the author to compute in the cohomology of a Shimura curve defined over a totally real field with arbitrary class number. Via the Jacquet-Langlands correspondence, we thereby compute systems of Hecke eigenvalues associated to Hilbert modular forms of arbitrary level over a totally real field of odd degree. We conclude with two examples which illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.

Background Originally from the state of Georgia, he received his B.S. from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He served as a Visiting Scholar in the Magma Computational Algebra Group at the University of Sydney in Australia, and did a post doctoral at the University of Minnesota through the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA). In addition to his appointment at UVM, he serves as a Visiting Researcher for McGill University and the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM) in Montreal.

Voight arrived at UVM in 2007 and is recognized by students for his engaging classes. He has taught Math 727: Quaternion Algebras at McGill and teaches Math 241: Analysis in Several Real Variables I; Math 255: Elementary Number Theory, as well as an Honors course entitled, A Social and Mathematical History of Cryptography at UVM.