The Hindu : Front Page : Ben Green to receive 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan prize

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 04, 2007
ePaper

Front Page

Front Page

Ben Green to receive 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan prize

The 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Ben Green, who is Hershel Smith Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, England. This annual prize, launched in 2005, is for outstanding contributions to areas on mathematics influenced by the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. The age limit has been set at 32 because Ramanujan achieved so much in his brief life of 32 years. The $10,000 prize will be awarded at the International Conference on Number Theory, Mathematical Physics, and Special Functions, December 20-22, at SASTRA University in Thanjavur, near Ramanujan’s hometown of Kumbakonam.

The 2007 SASTRA Prize Citation is as follows:

“Ben Green is awarded the 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for his phenomenal contributions to number theory by himself and in collaboration with Terence Tao, that have changed the face of combinatorial additive number theory. The prize recognises the far reaching impact of the ingenious new methods developed by him, and in collaboration with Terence Tao, that involve an interplay of combinatorial ideas, number theoretic methods, and analytic techniques, which significantly extend the powerful higher uniformity method of Tim Gowers and the classic Circle Method of Hardy-Littlewood-Ramanujan. The prize recognises his many outstanding results including his resolution of the Cameron-Erdos conjecture, his proof of a version of Roth’s theorem for the primes in his 2005 Annals of Mathematics paper, which ultimately led to his revolutionary joint work with Terence Tao that confirms arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions among the primes and settled a celebrated long standing conjecture."

At the very young age of 30, Ben Green is at the pinnacle of the world of mathematics. Awards and recognitions have come to him in rapid succession starting with the Smith Prize at Cambridge University in 2001 while he was doing his PhD under Fields Medalist Tim Gowers, the Clay Mathematics Fellowship in 2005, and his appointment as Hershel Smith Professor at Cambridge University in 2006.

He also delivered one of the invited lectures at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006. Green is also Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, following the great tradition of that college where Hardy and Ramanujan were Fellows. Green emerged as the top choice from a pool of brilliant young mathematicians from around the world. The international panel of experts who formed the 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee are:

Chair — Krishnaswami Alladi (University of Florida),

George Andrews (The Pennsylvania State University), Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University),

James Lepowsky (Rutgers University), Tom Koornwinder (University of Amsterdam), Kannan Soundararajan (Stanford University), and Michel Waldschmidt (University of Paris). “Previous winners of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize are Manjul Bhargava and Kannan Soundararajan in 2005 (two prizes), and Terence Tao in 2006.

Thus the SASTRA Prize is awarded to the best of the best, and this lofty international standard is continued with the award of the 2007 Prize to Ben Green,” said Professor Krishnaswami Alladi, Chair of the Prize Committee.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Front Page