Assaf Naor and June Huh, professors of mathematics, have been named 2021 Simons Investigators by the Simons Foundation.

Naor was a 2018 recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics and a 2019 recipient of the Ostrowski Prize for outstanding mathematical achievement. He joined Princeton in 2014 from New York University, where he had taught since 2006. Prior to his academic career, Naor had worked at Microsoft Research. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and has also received a European Mathematical Society Prize and the Salem Prize. Naor gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Functional Analysis and Applications."

Although Huh joined the Princeton faculty on July 1, he is not new to the University and to the Princeton mathematics community. Huh was a Veblen Fellow at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) from 2014 to 2017 and a Visiting Professor at the IAS from 2017 to 2020. He was also a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute from 2014 to 2019 and a professor at Stanford in 2020 and 2021. Huh was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro, on the topic of "Combinatorial applications of the Hodge–Riemann relations." He was awarded the New Horizons Prize for Early-Career Achievement in Mathematics from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation in 2019. Huh is known for proving the Heron–Rota–Welsh conjecture in joint work with Eric Katz and Karim Adiprasito.

Simons Investigators receive a stable base of research support and funding from the foundation to aid their long-term study of fundamental questions in mathematics, physics, astrophysics or computer science. The program seeks outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists.

Read the Simons Foundation’s announcement of the 2021 Simons Investigators.