Ben Green Awarded 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize

The 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Ben Green, who is the Herchel Smith Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Established in 2005, the prize is given annually to a mathematician no more than 32 years old who has made significant contributions to areas of mathematics that were influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan. The upper age limit is set at 32 because Ramanujan (born in Kumbakonam, India) died at 32.

According to Krishnaswami Alladi of the University of Florida, Green has made "phenomenal contributions to several important problems in combinatorial additive number theory," individually and in collaboration with Fields Medalist Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, who won the 2006 prize. "This stunning progress," Alladi said, "has been achieved by ingenious new methods involving an interplay of combinatorial ideas, number theoretic methods, and analytic techniques." Alladi chaired the prize committee.

Green, in collaboration with Tao, extended what is called the circle method, originally due to G.H. Hardy and Ramanujan, which estimates the number of partitions of an integer. Hardy and Littlewood later developed it into a versatile tool in additive number theory. Green's mathematical work (scheduled for publication in the Annals of Mathematics) is already impacting analytic number theory.

Green will receive the $10,000 prize at the International Conference on Number Theory, Theoretical Physics, and Special Functions, scheduled for Dec. 20-22, at SASTRA (Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology, and Resarch Academy), in Kumbakonam, India.

Source: University of Florida, Oct. 2, 2007.