Michael Thoreau Lacey (born September 26, 1959) is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. Lacey received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

from the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Uni ...

in 1987, under the direction of Walter Philipp.. His thesis was in the area of probability in

Banach space In mathematics, more specifically in functional analysis, a Banach space (pronounced ) is a complete normed vector space. Thus, a Banach space is a vector space with a metric that allows the computation of vector length and distance between ve ...

s, and solved a problem related to the

law of the iterated logarithm In probability theory, the law of the iterated logarithm describes the magnitude of the fluctuations of a random walk. The original statement of the law of the iterated logarithm is due to A. Ya. Khinchin (1924). Another statement was given by A ...

for empirical characteristic functions. In the intervening years, his work has touched on the areas of

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

ergodic theory Ergodic theory (Greek: ' "work", ' "way") is a branch of mathematics that studies statistical properties of deterministic dynamical systems; it is the study of ergodicity. In this context, statistical properties means properties which are expres ...

, and

harmonic analysis Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves, and the study of and generalization of the notions of Fourier series and Fourier transforms (i.e. an e ...

. His first postdoctoral positions were at the

Louisiana State University Louisiana State University (officially Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as LSU) is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1860 near ...

, and the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which r ...

. While at UNC, Lacey and Walter Philipp gave their proof of the almost sure

central limit theorem In probability theory, the central limit theorem (CLT) establishes that, in many situations, when independent random variables are summed up, their properly normalized sum tends toward a normal distribution even if the original variables thems ...

. He held a position at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. * Indiana Univers ...

from 1989 to 1996. While there, he received a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

Postdoctoral Fellowship, and during the tenure of this fellowship he began a study of the bilinear

Hilbert transform In mathematics and in signal processing, the Hilbert transform is a specific linear operator that takes a function, of a real variable and produces another function of a real variable . This linear operator is given by convolution with the func ...

. This transform was at the time the subject of a conjecture by Alberto Calderón that Lacey and Christoph Thiele solved in 1996, for which they were awarded the

Salem Prize The Salem Prize, in memory of Raphael Salem, is awarded each year to young researchers for outstanding contributions to the field of analysis. It is awarded by the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was fo ...

. Since 1996, he has been a Professor of Mathematics at the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

. In 2004, he received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

for joint work with Xiaochun Li. In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-01-27.

References

External links

MathSciNet MathSciNet is a searchable online bibliographic database created by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. It contains all of the contents of the journal '' Mathematical Reviews'' (MR) since 1940 along with an extensive author database, links ...

Home page
at Georgia Tech. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Lacey, Michael 1959 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni Georgia Tech faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society