PKU alumnus Zhu Xinwen wins 2020 Breakthrough Prize—New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
Sep 17, 2019
Peking University, Sept. 11, 2019: The recipients of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize, which was highly praised as “Oscars of Science”, were announced on September 5, 2019. Zhu Xinwen, alumnus of School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University (PKU), won New Horizons in Mathematics Prize of this year’s Breakthrough Prize for his significant breakthrough in arithmetic algebraic geometry including applications to the theory of Shimura varieties and the Riemann-Hilbert problem for p-adic varieties. He became the fourth PKU alumnus to win the prize after Yun Zhiwei, Zhang Wei and Xu Chenyang. It is also the third consecutive year that a member of the “Golden Generation” of PKU Mathematicians has received this prize.
Zhu Xinwen
Zhu obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, after receiving a bachelor’s degree at PKU in 2004. He became Associate Professor of Mathematics at California Institute of Technology in 2014 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2016. As one of the most outstanding contemporary young mathematicians in Chinese mathematical community, he is mainly dedicated to study of geometric representation theory and has made important achievements in this field. Zhu was awarded AMS Centennial Fellowship in 2013 and won ICCM Gold Prize for Mathematics in 2016.
Students who enrolled around the year of 2000 in PKU School of Mathematics were given the name “Golden Generation” for their extraordinary success in the field of mathematics. They have been among the recipients of major awards such as Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal, Sloan Research Fellowship, US National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, Qiu Shi Outstanding Young Scholars Award, and Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. Three of them were invited to make keynote speeches at International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2018.
These innovative and devoted alumni often come back to PKU and contribute to the development of the discipline of mathematics and talent cultivation. Five of them joined 2019 Young Mathematician Forum held at PKU in June 2019 and shared their progress and ideas with students.
Written by: Shi Jingjing
Edited by: Ma Yaoli
Source: PKU News (Chinese)
