The Israel Halperin Prize 2025
The Israel Halperin Prize is awarded every five years to one or two young mathematicians in the Canadian community working in the fields of operator theory and operator algebras. It is named in honour of Professor Israel Halperin (1911–2007), one of the pioneers of mathematics in Canada. Past winners of the prize sit on the selection committee. (See https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~krdavids/IsraelHalperinPrize.html .)
The 2025 winners are Michael Hartz and Christopher Schafhauser.
Citation: Michael Hartz
Michael Hartz earned his Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in 2016 under the supervision of Kenneth Davidson. His first paper, as a Master’s student of J. Eschmeier, established the rigidity of certain operator algebras associated to radical ideals, answering a conjecture of Davidson, Ramsey and Shalit. Hartz’s work resolved two of the most important open problems in the study of commutative operator algebras: with Aleman, Mc- Carthy and Richter, he characterized interpolating sequences for multipliers of the Drury- Arveson space; and he established the column-row property for complete Nevanlinna-Pick spaces, which has many striking consequences. He has made many deep contributions to operator theory and operator algebras. In 2020, Michael was awarded the Barbara and Jaroslav Zemánek Prize in functional analysis by the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Science. He is currently a Professor at Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken.
For these and other contributions, Michael Hartz is awarded the 2025 Israel Halperin Prize.
Citation: Christopher Schafhauser
Christopher Schafhauser earned his Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Nebraska under the supervision of Allan Donsig and David Pitts. As a postdoc at U. Waterloo and then York U., he established himself a new force in the field of C*-algebras with several major results: a new, concise proof of the Tikuisis-White-Winter Theorem, embedding every separable exact C∗-algebra with amenable trace and UCT into a simple monotracial AF algebra, and a characterization of the ideal property for crossed products (with M. Kennedy). Schafhauser was a critical contributor to the conceptual and self-contained C*-algebra classification theorem of Carrion et al. More recently, he established a beautiful KK-rigidity theorem for simple nuclear C*-algebras. In 2024, Chris was awarded the Barbara and Jaroslav Zemánek Prize in functional analysis by the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Science. Schafhauser is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
For these and other contributions, Christopher Schafhauser is awarded the 2025 Israel Halperin Prize.
Kenneth R. Davidson and George A. Elliott (on behalf of the Selection Committee)
