Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians 2020

    • The Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians 2020 was awarded to Dr. Carolina Araujo, Mathematician from the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in a virtual ceremony on 9th December 2020.

    • The prize is awarded annually to a researcher from a developing country funded by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India in collaboration with ICTP (International Centre for Theoretical Physics), and the International Mathematical Union.

    • Dr. Carolina Araujo was given the award for her outstanding work

        ◦ in algebraic geometry in particular in birational geometry and the theory of extremal rays, of which she gave important applications, in particular obtaining a characterization of projective spaces and hyperquadrics

        ◦ for her work in the study and classification of Fano varieties, and her study of algebraic foliations.

        ◦ and for playing a key role in promoting women in mathematics and in the organization of important mathematical activities.

    • Dr. Araujo, who is Vice President of the Committee for Women in Mathematics at the International Mathematical Union, is the first non-Indian to receive this prize and will be a role model for all women.

    • She has also been a Simons Associate with ICTP since 2015.

    • At the award ceremony, Dr Araujo spoke about algebraic geometry, including birational geometry and foliations in a talk titled 'Algebraic Varieties with Positive Tangent Bundles'.

    • The Prize, given every year to young mathematicians less than 45 years of age who have conducted outstanding research in a developing country, has been instituted by DST in the memory of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius in pure mathematics who was essentially self-taught and made spectacular contributions to elliptic functions, continued fractions, infinite series, and analytical theory of numbers.

    • Researchers working in any branch of the mathematical sciences are eligible.

    • The Prize carries a $15,000 cash award.

    • The Selection Committee takes into account not only the scientific quality of the research, but also the background of the candidate and the environment in which the work was carried out. The Committee in particular favours candidates who have overcome adversity to achieve distinction in mathematics.

    • Last year’s winner was Professor Hoàng Hiệp Phạm of the Institute of Mathematics, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of complex analysis, and in particular to pluripotential theory, where he obtained an important result on the singularities of plurisubharmonic functions; complex Monge-Ampère equations and log canonical thresholds.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants. The views expressed here are personal.)