Ana Caraiani, our new Hausdorff Chair, receives a highly endowed research prize. She is awarded a New Horizons Prize in Mathematics. The $$100,000 award is given to early-career scientists who have already made a significant impact on their field. In addition, Vera Traub, junior professor at the Research Institute for Mathematics, receives the $$50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, which is awarded to up to three outstanding women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the past two years.
The world’s largest science prize, the Breakthrough Prize awards up to five $3 million prizes each year for major contributions to fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics. For the eleventh year, the Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the “Oscars of Science,” recognizes the world’s top scientists. Each prize is $3 million and presented in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. In addition, up to three New Horizons in Physics Prizes, up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes and up to three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes are given out to early-career researchers each year. The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki and have been sponsored by foundations established by them. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates in each field choose the winners.
Ana Caraiani is awarded the New Horizon in Mathematics Prize for "diverse transformative contributions to the Langlands program, and in particular for work with Peter Scholze on the Hodge-Tate period map for Shimura varieties and its applications". Since a few weeks she holds a Hausdorff Chair at the HCM. Since the establishment of the Hausdorff Center, these additional W3 professorships have been filled with outstanding international scientists on a candidate-oriented basis. The 37-year-old Romanian is the first woman in this position. Ana Caraiani already had a close connection to Bonn: In 2016, she became a Bonn Junior Fellow and, after her appointment at Imperial College London, was associated with the Hausdorff Center as a Bonn Research Fellow until recently. She works at the interface between the Langlands Program and arithmetic geometry. In 2007, the Association for Women in Mathematics awarded Ana Caraiani the Alice T. Schafer Prize. In 2018, she was one of the winners of the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society, and in 2020 she won the EMS Prize. Having started her position at Bonn some weeks ago, she is very convinced of the excellent opportunities in Bonn: "Bonn is one of the best places in the world to work on arithmetic geometry."
Vera Traub is awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for "advances in approximation results in classical combinatorial optimization problems, including the traveling salesman problem and network design". She was also recently appointed to the University of Bonn, as a junior professor at the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics. She is also a member of the HCM. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in Rico Zenklusen's group at ETH Zurich. Like Ana Caraiani, Vera Traub has a long-standing relationship with the University of Bonn: she completed her dissertation in 2020 under the supervision of Jens Vygen at the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics and received prestigious awards for it (the Hausdorff Memorial Prize and the EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award). In her PhD thesis, Vera Traub made important breakthroughs on open questions of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Subsequently, she achieved fundamental advances in network design. The TSP and network design are among the most prominent problems in combinatorial optimization.