Indian mathematician named joint-winner of Michael and Sheila Held Prize
What's the story
Nikhil Srivastava, a young Indian mathematician, has been named winner of the prestigious 2021 Michael and Sheila Held Prize along with two others for solving long-standing questions on the Kadison-Singer problem and Ramanujan graphs. The prize, which was established in 2017 by the bequest of Michael and Sheila Held, consists of a medal and $10,000.
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Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman are the other two winners
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) said in a statement, "Srivastava from the University of California, Berkeley, Adam Marcus, from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and Daniel Alan Spielman from Yale University will receive the 2021 Michael and Sheila Held Prize."
Accomplishment
They solved the decades-old Kadison-Singer problem
Srivastava is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of California. According to the Yale News, "They published new constructions of Ramanujan graphs that describe sparse, but highly-connected networks, and a solution to the Kadison-Singer problem, a decades-old problem that asks whether unique information can be gleaned from a system in which only some of the features can be observed or measured."
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Their proofs provided tools to solve various other problems: NAS
The NAS said, "Their proofs provided new tools to address numerous other problems, which have been embraced by other computer scientists seeking to apply the geometry of polynomials to solve discrete optimization problems."
Details
Their groundbreaking papers were published in 2015
NAS said, "Srivastava, Marcus, and Spielman solved long-standing questions on the Kadison-Singer problem and Ramanujan graphs, and uncovered a deep new connection between linear algebra, the geometry of polynomials, and graph theory that has inspired the next generation of theoretical computer scientists." "Their groundbreaking papers published in 2015, solved problems that mathematicians had been working on for several decades," the NAS added.
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About the Michael and Sheila Held Prize
The Michael and Sheila Held Prize is presented annually and honors outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimization, or related parts of computer science, such as the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory.