National   

SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for young German Professor

The 2009 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Professor Kathrin Bringmann of the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Minnesota, U.S. This annual prize, established in 2005, is for outstanding contributions to areas of mathematics influenced by the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920).

The age limit for the prize is 32, for Ramanujan achieved so much in his brief life of 32 years. The $10,000 prize will be awarded on December 22, during an International Conference on Number Theory at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, Ramanujan’s hometown. December 22 is Ramanujan’s birthday.

The citation mentioned Professor Bringmann’s outstanding research on modular forms and mock theta functions by herself and in collaboration with several mathematicians, most notably Ken Ono, in which important connections between mock theta functions and the theory of modular forms initially observed by Sander Zwegers are analysed and established explicitly, questions concerning asymptotics and congruences are addressed, and a comprehensive theory relating holomorphic cusp forms to Maass forms is developed.

According to the citation, the prize recognises her outstanding Ph.D thesis of 2004 dealing with applications of Poincare series on Jacobi groups, the results of which were published in Mathematische Zeitschrift (2006) and the Journal of the London Mathematical Society (2006), her path-breaking paper in the Annals of Mathematics with Ken Ono which builds on work by Sander Zwegers and Don Zagier and shows that Ramanujan’s 22 mock theta functions are special cases of infinite families of weak Maass forms of weight 1/2, her seminal paper with Ken Ono in Inventiones Mathematicae (2006) where exact formulas for the coefficients of one of Ramanujan’s third order mock theta functions is obtained, the consequence of which is the resolution of the 40-year-old Andrews-Dragonnette conjecture, another landmark paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (2007) with Ken Ono on lifts of homorphic cusp forms of half integral weight to harmonic weak Maass forms, which leads to an understanding of all of Ramanujan’s mock theta functions, and her fundamental paper in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (2008) with Ken Ono and Robert Rhoades explaining the Eulerian identities associated with the mock theta conjectures of George Andrews and Frank Garvan.

The citation adds that the prize also recognises Professor Bringmann’s collaborations with Frank Garvan and Karl Mahlburg on partition statistics and quasi-harmonic Maass forms in International Mathematics Research Notices (2008), her work with Amanda Folsom and Ken Ono on q-series and weight 3/2 Maass forms in Compositio Mathematica (2009), her recent work with Sander Zwegers on rank-crank type partial differential equations and non-holomorphic Jacobi forms in Mathematics Research Letters, and her collaboration with Jeremy Lovejoy including their joint paper in International Mathematics Research Notices (2007) on Dyson’s rank, over partitions and weak Maass forms.

Kathrin Bringmann was born on May 8, 1977 in Muenster, Germany. After passing the State Examinations in Mathematics and Theology in 2002 and obtaining a diploma in Mathematics with top honours in 2003, both at the University of Wuerzburg, she got her Ph.D from the University of Heidelberg in 2004 under the direction of Professor Winfried Kohnen. During 2004-07, she was Van Vleck Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin where she began her collaboration with Professor Ken Ono. After briefly serving as an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, she joined the University of Cologne as Professor.

Earlier this year, she was awarded the Krupp Prize, a million-euro research grant for a five-year period awarded to young professors.

Professor Bringmann emerged as the choice from a pool of mathematicians from around the world. The international panel of experts who formed the 2009 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee comprised Krishnaswami Alladi (Chair: from the University of Florida), Bruce Berndt (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jonathan Borwein (Dalhousie University, Canada and University of Newcastle, Australia), Dorian Goldfeld (Columbia University), Stephen Milne (Ohio State University), Wolfgang Schmidt (University of Colorado), and Jeffrey Vaaler (University of Texas).

Previous winners are Manjul Bhargava and Kannan Soundararajan in 2005 (two prizes), Terence Tao in 2006, Ben Green in 2007, and Akshay Venkatesh in 2008. “This year’s prize winner Kathrin Bringmann has done spectacular work in an area that is most closely associated with Ramanujan, namely the mock theta functions, and in collaboration with Ken Ono has made major strides towards resolving Freeman Dyson’s great challenge regarding the mock theta functions,” said Professor Krishnaswami Alladi.

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

Stories in this Section

With better storage, imports can be avoided: Swaminathan
Invisible force giving arms to CPI(M): Mamata
Naga outfits to reject any ‘conditional’ peace package
EU for India to quantify its emission targets
No objection to CBI probe in Ishrat case: Centre
Unconditional release sought
Rebels refuse to back off
Vidarbha, crucial to parties’ fortunes
SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for young German Professor
Pro-Jagan MLAs from different districts threaten to resign
Karnataka justifies execution of Shivasamudram project
CBI inquiry demanded into killing of Sohrabuddin accomplice

Copyright © 2009, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu