2016 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize announced

The 2016 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize was announced recently, this year the prize was awarded jointly to Kaisa Matomaki (University of Turku, Finland) and Maksym Radziwill (McGill University, Canada and Rutgers University, the US) for their “deep and far reaching contributions to several important problems in diverse areas of number theory and especially for their spectacular collaboration which is revolutionising the subject”. The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize was established in 2005 and is awarded annually for outstanding contributions by young mathematicians to areas influenced by Indian mathematical genius Srinavasa Ramanujan.

The 2016 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee consists of Alladi- Chair (University of Florida), Henri Darmon (McGill University), Winfried Kohnen (University of Heidelberg), Hugh Montgomery (University of Michigan), Peter Sarnak (Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Michael Schlosser (University of Vienna), and Cameron Stewart (University of Waterloo).

Kaisa Matomaeki

Kaisa Sofia Matomäki (born April 30 1985) is a Finnish mathematician who deals with analytical number theory. Matomäki studied mathematics at the University of Turku earning a diploma in 2005 under Matti Jutila (her thesis was on the existence of small gaps between primes). In 2009 she received her doctorate under Glyn Harman at Royal Holloway College, London University (with a PhD thesis titled Applications of sieve methods in analytic number theory).

Maksym Raziwill

Maksym Radziwill is a Russian-born Canadian mathematician who deals with analytical number theory.Radziwill did in doctorate in 2013 at Stanford University under the supervision of Kannan Soundararajan (his PhD thesis title was Zero-distribution and size of the Riemann zeta-function on the critical line). As a post-doc, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques and at Rutgers University and is now an assistant professor at McGill University.

The prize was awarded in particular for their joint publication Multiplicative functions in short Intervals of 2016, which represents a breakthrough in analytic number theory. It establishes a connection between the behavior of multiplicative number theoretic functions (such as the Möbius function and the Liouville function) at small intervals to other things where their behavior is partially well known. They used this work, for example in order to achieve progress in Chowla conjecture.

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