Carlo Pagano awarded the MCA Prize 2025

Carlo Pagano of Concordia University, a frequent and recent visitor at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, has received the MCA Prize 2025 [4]. Every four years, the Mathematical Council of the Americas applauds the work of five early career mathematicians. The conference and award ceremony were held this year in Miami, Florida.

In joint work with Peter Koymans, Carlo settled Stevenhagen's conjecture on the negative Pell equation, which is a very impressive result in arithmetic statistics. Their breakthrough was covered extensively in the Quanta magazine and can be found here [5].

But Peter and Carlo have not stopped there. They switched gears and are now tackling problems concerning decidability, in particular related to the (non-)existence of an algorithm that determines, under certain assumptions, whether a Diophantine equation has a solution. You can read more about this in another Quanta magazine article [6] about their work.

Carlo’s strong ties to MPIM include his two year postdoctoral stay, followed by multiple subsequent visits.

Here [7] you can find our interview with him.