Peter Scholze to receive 2013 Sastra Ramanujan Prize
PETER SCHOLZE TO RECEIVE 2013 SASTRA RAMANUJAN PRIZE
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The 2013 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Professor Peter Scholze of the University of Bonn, Germany. This annual prize of $10,000 established in 2005 by SASTRA University is for very young mathematicians for outstanding contributions to areas influenced by 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 2013 prize will be awarded during Dec 21-22 at the International Conference on Number Theory and Galois Representations at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, Ramanujan's hometown. "Professor Scholze who will turn 26 in December, is the youngest full professor in Germany and the youngest recipient of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize as well" said Krishnaswami Alladi, Chair of the Prize Committee.
Professor Scholze has made revolutionary contributions to several domains at the interface of Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry and the Theory of Automorphic Forms, and especially in the area of Galois Representations. Already in his Masters Thesis he gave new proofs of the Local Langland Conjecture for p-adic local fields and for general linear groups as well. His approach was strikingly different and much simpler compared to earlier approaches, yet even more efficient. This fundamental work done in 2010 appeared in two papers in the prestigious journal Inventiones Mathematicae in 2013.
While his Masters thesis was groundbreaking, his PhD thesis written under the direction of Professor Michael Rapoport at the University of Bonn was a more marvellous breakthrough and a step up in terms of originality and insight. In his thesis he developed a new p-adic machine called Perfectoid Spaces and used it to prove brilliantly a significant part of the weight monodromy conjecture due to 1978 Fields Medalist Pierre Deligne, thereby breaking an impasse of more than 30 years. He then developed his theory of perfectoid spaces to make advances of other important problems that had resisted solution, such as a problem on spectral sequences that 2010 Abel Prize winner John Tate had raised four decades earlier. Work in his PhD thesis appeared in a massive paper in the publications of the IHES in 2012.
Professor Scholze's most recent work is on Galois representations which in particular has startling implications on the cohomology of locally symmetric spaces. This work again represents the first great progress on certain questions in 40 years.
Peter Scholze was born in Dresden in December 1987 - at the time of the Ramanujan Centennial. Barely over the age of 25 now, he is already one of the most influential mathematicians in the world.
His work has been estimated by the greatest experts to possess the quality of the timeless classics and expected to have a major impact in the progress of mathematics in the coming decades.
The 2013 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee consisted of Professors Krishnaswami Alladi - Chair (University of Florida), Kathrin Bringmann (University of Cologne), Roger Heath-Brown (Oxford University), David Masser (University of Basel), Barry Mazur (Harvard University), Ken Ribet (University of California, Berkeley), and Ole Warnaar (University of Queensland).