Dr. David Handelman

A young Canadian mathematican of international reputation who has made important contributions to algebra and analysis. Having started with abstract ring theory, he turned his attention to von Neumann regular rings and C*-algebras, becoming the leading expert in dimension groups and displaying a mastery of K-theory and its applications. He solved three open problems posed by eminent mathematicians by methods both sophisticated and ingenious; Kaplansky's 1951 question on the equivalence of left and right projections in finite C*-algebras, the 1960 classification problem of approximately finite C*-algebras and a question by Bass in 1963 concerning the propinquity of Gorenstien rings.