German wins 2009 SASTRA award

CHENNAI: Kathrin Bringmann of the University of Cologne, Germany, has been chosen for the 2009 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, which carries a purse of $10,000. Bringmann will receive the award on December 22, the birth anniversary of Ramanujan, at SASTRA University in Kumbakkonam, where she will deliver the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Commemorative Lecture.

The annual prize, established by SASTRA University in 2005, is awarded for outstanding contributions to areas of mathematics influenced by the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. The age limit for the prize has been set at 32 because Ramanujan achieved so much in his brief life of 32 years.

Bringmann, who was born on May 8, 1977, in Muenster, Germany, obtained a Diploma in Mathematics with top honours at Wuerzburg in 2003, and then received her PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 2004. During 2004-07, she was Van Vleck Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin where she began her collaboration with Professor Ken Ono. After briefly serving as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, she joined the University of Cologne, Germany, as professor.

Earlier this year, she was awarded the prestigious Krupp Prize — a one million Euro research grant for a five-year period awarded to young professors. “The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize comes on the heels of the Krupp Prize” said R Sethuraman, Vice-Chancellor of SASTRA University.

Previous winners of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize are Manjul Bhargava (Princeton) and Kannan Soundararajan (Univ of Michigan)in 2005 (two prizes), Terence Tao (UCLA) in 2006, Ben Green (Cambridge) in 2007, and Akshay Venkatesh (Stanford) in 2008.

The international panel of experts on the 2009 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee are: Chair — Krishnaswami Alladi (University of Florida), Bruce Berndt (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jonathan Borwein (Dalhousie University, Canada and University of Newcastle, Australia), Dorian Goldfeld (Columbia University), Stephen Milne (Ohio State University),  Wolfgang Schmidt (University of Colorado), and Jeffrey Vaaler (University of Texas).