Max Planck Institute for Mathematics

Geordie Williamson, who has been Advanced Researcher at MPIM from 2011-2016, will be the youngest scientist ever to become a member of the Royal Society.

Geordie Williamson works in Representation Theory. He has made several fundamental contributions to the field including his proof (with Ben Elias) of the Kazhdan-Lusztig positivity conjecture, his algebraic proof of the Jantzen conjectures, and his discovery of counter-examples to the Lusztig conjecture in modular representation theory.

Maryna Viazovska, who conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from 2008-2012 under the guidance of Don Zagier, was awarded the Ramanujan Prize for 2017. Professor Viazovska is honored “for her stunning solution in dimension 8 of the celebrated sphere packing problem, and for her equally impressive joint work with Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller and Danylo Radchenko resolving the sphere packing problem in dimension 24, by building upon her fundamental ideas in dimension 8.” The prize also recognizes her outstanding PhD thesis of 2013 at the University of Bonn in which she resolved significant cases of the Gross-Zagier Conjecture and her work prior to her PhD with A. Bodarenko and D. Radchenko resolving a long-standing conjecture of Korevaar and Meyers on spherical designs, that appeared in the Annals of Mathematics in 2013. The prize notes that the modular forms techniques developed by Viazovska will have a significant future impact in discrete geometry, analytic number theory, and harmonic analysis. It was awarded on December 22 (Ramanujan's birthday), 2017 at the International Conference on Number Theory at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, India, Ramanujan’s hometown.

Di Yang (MPIM visitor from 09/2016 - 08/2018) and  Xuanyu Pan (MPIM visitor from 10/2016 - 09/2017) were each awarded one of the coveted and highly competitive awards from the Thousand Talents Program of the Chinese government. The award consists of a faculty position and funding up to 3 million RMB usually complemented by additional funds from the host university. Di Yang will be based at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Xuanyu Pan will be based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.