Swiss mathematician bags 2017 SASTRA Ramanujan Award

The award citation along with the prize money of USD10,000 was presented to Maryna Viazovska by Badrinarayanan Parthasarathy, Vice-President, Networks and Services engineering, Tata Communications.

Professor Krishnaswami Alladi of the University of Florida, the Chair of the prize committee since its inception, who read out the citation for the award said Maryna Viazovska has been awarded the 2017 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for her stunning and elegant resolution of the celebrated sphere packing problem in dimension 8, the proof of which appeared in her paper in the Annals of Mathematics (2017) and for her joint 2017 paper in the Annals of Mathematics with Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D Miller and Danylo Radchenko, which resolves the sphere packing problem in dimension 24 by building on her ideas in dimension 8.

The prize also recognises 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, the citation said. Maryna Viazovska, now 32 years old, was born in Kiev in the Ukraine on November 2,1984.