2 NRIs win global maths awards
Thursday, 14/08/2014
http://epaper.dailypostindia.com/Details.aspx?id=112980&boxid=63462&uid=&dat=2014-08-14
Seoul: Two Indian-origin mathematicians have won prestigious global prizes in the field of mathematics with one of them being awarded the Fields Medal — known as the “Nobel Prize of mathematics”.
Manjul Bhargava, a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, was on Wednesday conferred the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014 hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in Seoul, a press release issued by the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences said.
Also on the same occasion, another Indian-origin mathematician Subhash Khot won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, awarded by the IMU), for his “prescient definition of the ‘Unique Games’ problem, and leading the effort to understand its complexity and its pivotal role in the study of efficient approximation of optimisation problems”.
Bhargava, born in 1974 in Canada, was awarded the Fields Medal for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves.
He is the recipient of the Mathematical Association of America prize in 2003, the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2005, the Cole Prize in Number Theory of the American Mathematical Society in 2008 and the Infosys Prize in 2012. Other three winners of the Fields Medal are Maryam Mirzakhani, the first Iranian and the first woman to win the medal, and Artur Avila, the first Brazilian, and Martin Hairer, first Austrian to win a Fields Medal.
