SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for 2022 goes to Yunqing Tang

The prize committee says the awardee’s works ‘display a remarkable combination of sophisticated techniques’ 

The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for 2022 will be awarded to Yunqing Tang, Assistant Professor with the University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.

The award, instituted by the Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy (SASTRA) in 2005 with a cash prize of $10,000, is presented annually to individuals aged 32 and below, who made outstanding contributions in the field of mathematics, influenced by Srinivasa Ramanjuan in a broad sense.

A release by Krishnaswami Alladi, chair of SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee, said Ms. Yunqing’s works “display a remarkable combination of sophisticated techniques, in which the arithmetic and geometry of modular curves and of Shimura varieties play a central role, and her results and methods are bound to have major impact on future research in this area.”

It said, “Tang's most recent joint work with Frank Calegari and Vesselin Dimitrov on modular equations is of great significance and also has ties with Ramanujan's own work.” Praising Ms. Yunqing as one of the deepest and most creative mathematicians of her age, it said, “her wide ranging contributions are bound to have impact in the decades ahead.”

Ms. Yunqing, born in China, completed her B. Sc in Peking University in 2011, following which she went to Harvard University for higher studies. She completed her PhD in 2016 at Harvard under the supervision of Mark Kisin. After stints in Princeton University as a postdoctoral fellow, Instructor, and Assistant Professor, she joined UC Berkeley in July 2022 as Assistant Professor.

The prize will be awarded at the International Conference on Number Theory during December 20-22, 2022 at SASTRA University. The prize committee included Don Blasius , University of California, Los Angeles; Dan Goldston, San Jose State University; Ken Ono, University of Virginia; Jonathan Pila, Oxford University; Zeev Rudnick, Tel Aviv University; and Cam Stewart, University of Waterloo.