Chenyang Xu awarded 2016 ICTP Ramanujan Prize

In an announcement earlier today it was announced that Chenyang Xu of Beijing International Center of Mathematical Research in China has been awarded the prestigious 2016 ICTP Ramanujan Prize. The Ramanujan Prize is awarded annually to a researcher from a developing country who is less than 45 years of age on 31 December of the year of the award, and who has conducted outstanding research in a developing country. The full citation of the award is given below

The prize is in recognition of Xu’s outstanding works in algebraic geometry, notably in the area of birational geometry, including works both on log canonical pairs and on Q-Fano varieties, and on the topology of singularities and their dual complexes.

More specifically, Xu proved in joint works with C. Hacon and J. McKernan the boundedness of log canonical pairs and resolved in the affirmative Shokurov’s ACC (Ascending Chain Condition) Conjecture on log canonical thresholds.  Xu established in a joint work with C. Li a procedure by which any generically Q-Fano test configuration can be replaced by a special test configuration with Q-Fano fibers such that the Donaldson-Futaki invariant does not increase, thereby reducing K-stability issues to testing against such special test configurations.  Xu proved the finiteness of algebraic fundamental groups of klt (Kawamata log terminal) singularities and in a joint work with Kollár proved for a Calabi-Yau pair (X, D) that the fundamental group of the dual complex of D is a quotient of the fundamental group of the smooth locus of X.

Building his work in part on applications and ramifications of methods from the Minimal Model Program, Xu has now demonstrated expertise over an impressively wide range of techniques in algebraic geometry and beyond to tackle a broad spectrum of geometric problems from birational geometry in characteristic 0 and characteristic p, topology of algebraic varieties, arithmetic geometry and Kähler geometry, and he has contributed to the strengthening of the subject of algebraic geometry in China.

The selection committee consisted of Idris Assani, Rajendra Bhatia, Stefano Luzzatto (chair), Maryam Mirzakhani, Ngaiming Mok. Last year, Amalendu Krishna from India was awarded the prize. To read more about the prize go the prize website.