Swiss professor to get 2017 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize

THANJAVUR: Maryna Viazovska of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland has been selected for the 2017 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize. The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize was established in 2005 and is awarded annually for outstanding contributions by young mathematicians to areas influenced by the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. The age limit for the prize has been set at 32 because Ramanujan achieved so much in his brief life of 32 years. The prize will be awarded during December 21-22, 2017 at the International Conference on Number Theory at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, Ramanujan’s hometown.

Viazovska is awarded the 2017 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for her stunning and elegant resolution of the celebrated sphere packing problem in dimension 8, the proof of which appeared in her paper in the Annals of Mathematics (2017), and for her joint 2017 paper in the Annals of Mathematics with Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D Miller and Danylo Radchenko, which resolves the sphere packing problem in dimension 24 by building on her ideas in dimension 8.

The prize also recognizes her outstanding PhD thesis of 2013 at the University of Bonn in which she resolved significant cases of the Gross-Zagier Conjecture and her work prior to her PhD with A. Bodarenko and D. Radchenko resolving a long standing conjecture of Korevaar and Meyers on spherical designs, that appeared in the Annals of Mathematics in 2013.

The prize notes that the modular forms techniques developed by Viazovska will have a significant future impact in discrete geometry, analytic number theory, and harmonic analysis, the citation said. Maryna Viazovska was born in Kiev, Ukraine, on November 2, 1984. She completed her high school education in Kiev in 2001, and her BSc in Mathematics in 2005 at the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University.

She then went to Germany where she obtained a Masters degree in 2007 from the University of Kaiserslautern, after which she joined the University of Bonn that year. She graduated with a PhD from Bonn in 2013 writing a thesis under the direction of Professor Don Zagier. Since her PhD, she has received several awards and recognitions such as the Salem Prize in 2016 and Clay Research Award in 2017.