Peking University, Sept. 21, 2012: The 2012 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be conferred on Yun Zhiwei on December 22, announced SASTRA University in India.
The prize will be presented on the concluding ceremony of the International Conference on the legacy of Ramanujan, organized by the National Board of Higher Mathematics of India and co-sponsored by SASTRA University and Delhi University.
Yun, graduated from Peking University (PKU) in 2004, has made fundamental contributions to several areas that lie at the interface of representation theory, algebraic geometry and number theory, said a press release.
Before Yun, the last PKU alumnus awarded was Zhang Wei in 2010, who had made significant progress in the realm of automorphic forms.
Background Info:
The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize is awarded annually to young mathematicians all over the world for their outstanding contributions to areas influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.
The prize was established in 2005 by Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy (SASTRA) University in Kumbakonam, Ramanujan's hometown in India. Currently amounting to $10,000, it is given only to those below the age of 32, the same as Ramanujan’s when he died.
Yun Zhiwei was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province in 1982. Awarded the gold medal with a full score in the 41th International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), he was recommended for admission to PKU to study mathematics in 2000.
After his graduation in 2004, Yun pursued his doctoral degree at Princeton University, following Professor Robert D. MacPherson. He has then been engaged in the post-doctoral work at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2009.
Yun Zhiwei has just completed a CLE Moore Instructorship at MIT, and will take up a faculty position at Stanford University this fall.
Yun has been concerned about the development of mathematics at PKU for long. He used to serve as a keynote speaker of 2011 Summer School on Arithmetic Geometry, as well as one of the organizers of Workshop on Arithmetic and Algebraic Geometry in 2011 and 2012. Recently, he was invited as a visiting scholar by Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research.
Written by: Dong Zhiyao
Edited by: Arthars
Source: PKU News (Chinese)
