The EMS Prize to Adiprasito and Nam
The European Mathematical Society (EMS) awards every fourth year 10 young researchers for excellent contributions in mathematics. This year, Karim Adiprasito and Phan Thành Nam are among the winners. The first is a professor here; the second did his PhD in Copenhagen ten years ago.
“We are proud that both a former PhD student and a current professor at the department receive the EMS Prize. It is a gratifying recognition that the strong academic development, that was started by the former head of department, Professor Erik Kjær Pedersen, has brought the Department to a very high level internationally”, says the present Head of Department, Michael Sørensen.
The 10 EMS Prizes are awarded “to young researchers not older than 35 years, of European nationality or working in Europe, in recognition of excellent contributions in mathematics.”
The EMS Prizes are usually announced at the opening ceremony of the European Congress of Mathematics. However, the congress scheduled to July 2020 has been postponed a year due to the Corona crisis - and prizewinners have been announced on the EMS homepage. All prize lectures will take place at the postponed ECM conference in June 2021.
Previous prize winners include several Fields medal recipients like Peter Scholze, Alessio Figalli, Artur Avila, Cedric Villani, Elon Lindenstrauss, Andrei Okounkov, and Stanislav Smirnov.
Karim Adiprasito
Karim Adiprasito, born in 1988 in Aachen, Germany, is a Professor here at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen.
Adiprasito works in the field of combinatorics, but combines methods from algebra, geometry and topology in innovative ways, solving problems in a wide range of areas.
He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2015 for “his wide-ranging and deep contributions to discrete geometry”, as well as the Klachky prize of the Hebrew University in 2017. He has been selected as a Wallenberg academy fellow in 2018. He was awarded the prestigious New Horizons Prize in Mathematics (2018) for the development of combinatorial Hodge theory leading to the resolution of the log-concavity conjecture of Heron-Rota-Welsh. His work is supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation and a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.
Phan Thành Nam
Phan Thành Nam, born 1985 in Tuy Hòa, Vietnam, is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. From 2008 to 2011, he did his PhD here in Copenhagen, with Professor Jan Philip Solovej as his advisor.
“Phan Thanh Nam has done remarkable work on the mathematics of quantum many-body systems including atoms, molecules as well as Bose and Fermi gases. His results concern both the equilibrium and dynamical properties of such systems. Many of the best-known results in the field are due to Nam. These include the best bound on the maximal ionization of atoms and the best-known constant in the celebrated Lieb-Thirring inequality”, says Jan Philip Solovej, and continues:
“Moreover, Nam and his collaborators have developed a very general approach to establish mean-field limits of Bosonic systems based on the quantum de Finetti Theorem. This is now the golden standard in the field”.
Before joining the Ludwig Maximilian University, Nam was an Assistant Professor at the Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and an IST Fellow at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria. He has twice been an invited speaker at the International Congress on Mathematical Physics (ICMP).