Indian-American mathematician Nikhil Srivastava among 3 to solve a popular 1959 problem, wins Ciprian Foias prize

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has unanimously picked eminent Indian-American mathematician Nikhil Srivastava for the inaugural $5,000 Ciprian Foias Prize for ‘highly original work’ in Operator Theory.

Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman are the other honorees, in addition to Prof. Srivastava, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Marcus is a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, where he holds the Chair of Combinatorial Analysis. Spielman is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science, a statistician and data scientist, and a mathematician.

According to a press release, the award recognises their highly original work in developing and introducing methods for understanding the characteristic polynomial of matrices, including the iterative sparsification method (also in collaboration with Batson) and the method of interlacing polynomials.

‘Together, these ideas provided a powerful toolkit with many applications, notably in the trio’s breakthrough paper Interlacing families II: mixed characteristic polynomials and the Kadison–Singer problem (Annals of Mathematics, 2015), which solves the famous paving problem in operator theory, formulated by Richard Kadison and Isadore Singer in 1959’, AMS said.

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The three honorees said in a joint statement that they accept the prize on behalf of the many people whose work contributed to the solution of the Kadison–Singer problem. Professor Srivastava and his colleagues will receive the award on January 5, 2022, during the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle, which is characterised as the world’s largest mathematics meeting.

Prof. Srivastava has now won three major prizes: the George Polya Prize in 2014, the Held Prize in 2021, and now the Ciprian Foias Prize.

In commemoration of Ciprian Foias, an eminent professor in Operator Theory and fluid dynamics, the award was founded in 2020. The current reward is $5,000, and it is given out every three years.