Mathematician Ruixiang Zhang to receive 2023 Sastra Ramanujan Prize

The cash prize of $10,000 will be given at an international conference in Number Theory during December third week at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s hometown.

Ruixiang Zhang, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, U.S. | Photo Credit: www.berkeley.edu.in

Ruixiang Zhang, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA will be awarded with the 2023 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for his outstanding contributions in mathematics.

The annual cash prize of USD 10,000 will be given at an international conference in Number Theory during December 20 and December 22 at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s hometown.

The age limit for the prize has been set at 32 influenced by Ramanujan’s achievements in his brief life of 32 years, a press release said.

Dr. Zhang is a young mathematician whose fundamental work spans from analytic number theory, combinatorics, Euclidean harmonic analysis to geometry. Building on his Princeton PhD thesis, Zhang in collaboration with Shaoming Guo proved a multivariable generalisation of the main conjecture in Vinogradov’s Mean Value Theorem. This work, which has appeared in Inventiones Mathematicae in 2019, is considered a major achievement.

While working on his thesis, Zhang branched out to work in restriction theory in Fourier and classical harmonic analysis. He contributed to solving two long-standing problems in restriction theory: (i) Carleson’s problem on pointwise convergence of solutions to the Schr¨odinger equation, and (ii) the two-dimensional case of Sogge’s local smoothing conjecture for wave equations.

In a 2019 Annals of Mathematics paper, Dr. Zhang along with Xiumin Du introduced novel techniques tailored to the problem raised by Carleson and settled the question in all dimensions. The highly skilled mathematician has had a major impact in a wide range of areas like harmonic analysis and its striking applications.

Dr. Zhang received his PhD in mathematics at Princeton University in 2017. After holding various positions at different institutions, he is now at the University of California since 2021. Besides many awards, Dr. Zhang currently holds a Sloan Fellowship (2022-24) and an NSF CAREER award (2022-27).

The 2023 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee comprised Krishnaswami Alladi -Chair (University of Florida), Don Blasius (University of California, Los Angeles), Sergei Konyagin (Lomonosov Moscow State University), Jonathan Pila (Oxford University), Bjorn Poonen (MIT), Zeev Rudnick (Tel Aviv University), and Wadim Zudilin (Radboud University, The Netherlands).