Washington: Eminent Indian-American mathematician Nikhil Srivastava, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, has been jointly selected for the inaugural Ciprian Foias Prize in Operator Theory by American Mathematical Society (AMS).
Along with Nikhil, the two other awardees are Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman. Adam Marcus holds the Chair of Combinatorial Analysis at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Daniel Spielman is Sterling Professor of Computer Science, a professor of statistics and data science, and a professor of mathematics.
The award recognises their highly original work that introduced and developed methods for understanding the characteristic polynomial of matrices, namely the iterative sparsification method (also in collaboration with Batson) and the method of interlacing polynomials, a media release said.
"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," American Mathematical Society said.
In a joint statement, the three awardees said they wish to accept it on behalf of the many people whose work contributed to the resolution of the Kadison-Singer problem.
