Elser, Veit: - Veit Elser, a Professor of Physics at Cornell University, is an expert in phase retrieval. His first major professional achievement was recognising that the atomic positions in quasicrystals could be understood as projections of points from a six-dimensional space into three dimensions. Projections continued to play a key role in his career, notably in 2001, when he discovered that the leading algorithm for solving the phase-retrieval problem was based on a pair of competing projections. Elser's work in physics was recognized by the William L. McMillan Prize.