Kari Vilonen
Kari Kaleva Vilonen (born 1955) is a Finnish mathematician, specializing in geometric representation theory. He is currently a professor at the University of Melbourne. Education He received in 1983 his Ph.D from Brown University under Robert MacPherson with thesis The Intersection Homology D-module on Hypersurfaces with Isolated Singularities. Career From 1983 to 1986 was a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on leave in 1984–1985 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. Afterward, Vilonen was a Benjamin Pierce Assistant Professor at Harvard University from 1986 to 1989. From 1989 to 2000 he was a faculty member at Brandeis University, rising to the rank of Professor in 1996. After that, he was a professor at Northwestern University, and then a professor at the University of Helsinki from 2010 to 2015. Starting in 2015, Vilonen has been a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. In 2002, with Dennis Gaitsgory and Edward Frenkel, he proved the geometrical Langlands conjecture for curves over finite fields. In 2004, Vilonen, Mark Goresky, Dennis Gaitsgory and Edward Frenkel were awarded a multimillion dollar grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to work on a project aimed