The 2020 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Shai Evra of Princeton University, U.S., and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
According to a press release, the annual prize is given for outstanding contributions by individuals not exceeding the age of 32, in areas of mathematics, influenced by Ramanujan in a broad sense.
Mr. Evra’s research concerns locally symmetric spaces of arithmetic groups and their combinatoric, geometric and topological structure.
The prize is awarded annually at an international conference in Number Theory, during December 21-22, at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam. Since the conference will not take place this year, Mr. Evra will receive the prize in 2021, in Kumbakonam.
According to the citation, the award is for his outstanding work on high dimensional expanders in the area of combinatorial and geometric topology and on “Golden Gates” for three dimensional unitary groups.
He employed “deep results from representation theory and number theory, pertaining to the Generalised Ramanujan Conjectures. The prize recognises his fundamental paper in the Journal of Topology and Analysis, in which he extends both the combinatorics and automorphic form theory to generalise the construction of Gromox and others on expander graphs”.
His fundamental work will have major implications even outside mathematics, extending into theoretical computer science, according to the citation.
The 2020 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee comprised Krishnaswami Alladi- chair (University of Florida); William Duke (University of California, Los Angeles); Kevin Ford (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign); Anne Schilling (University of California, Davis); Robert Tijdeman (Leiden University); Maryna Viazovska (Ecole Polytechnique, Lausanne) and Shouwu Zhang (Princeton University).
