MEDIA REPORT

SASTRA-Ramanujan award for Terence Tao

SOUTHERN NEWS - TAMIL NADU

THANJAVUR: The SASTRA-Ramanujan award for the year 2006 will be awarded to Prof Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, in recognition of his contributions to mathematics in number theory, harmonic analysis, representation theory and partial differential equations. The award carries a cash prize of USD 10,000.

According to Prof R Sethuraman, vice-chancellor of SASTRA University, the annual prize, launched in 2005, is given for outstanding contributions in areas of mathematics influenced by the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The age limit for the prize has been set at 32.

The 2006 SASTRA-Ramanujan prize committee chaired by Prof Krishnaswami Alladi of University of Florida selected Prof Terence Tao.

The other members of the committee were George Andrews of the Pennsylvania State University, Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University, James Lepowsky of Rutgers University, Tom Koornwinder of University of Amsterdam, Kannan Soundararajan of University of Michigan and Stanford University and Michel Waldschmidt of University of Paris.

One of Tao's most notable contributions is to the famous Kakeya Problem in higher dimensions, which has major applications in Fourier analysis and partial differential equations.

In joint work with Nets Katz, Izabella Laba and others, Tao significantly improved all previously known estimates for the fractal dimension using new and surprisingly simple combinatorial ideas in an ingenious way.

Born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1975, Prof Tao lived there until 1992. He did his BSc (Honors) and MSc at Flinders University of South Australia. He then went to Princeton University in 1992 for his PhD, which he completed in 1996 under the direction of Prof Elias Stein.

He received the Sloan Dissertation Fellowship for the final year of his PhD work. He is currently professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.

The SASTRA-Ramanujan award will be presented to Prof Tao at the International conference on Number Theory and Combinatorics to be held at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, Ramanujan's hometown, from December 19 to 22.