Indian mathematician Nikhil Srivastava named joint winner of Michael and Sheila Held Prize

Nikhil Srivastava, a younger Indian mathematician, has been named winner of the celebrated 2021 Michael and Sheila Held Prize together with two others for fixing long-standing questions on the Kadison-Singer drawback and on Ramanujan graphs.
Srivastava from the University of California, Berkeley, Adam Marcus, the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Daniel Alan Spielman from Yale University will obtain the 2021 Michael and Sheila Held Prize, the National Academy of Sciences mentioned within the assertion.
The prize consists of a medal and USD 100,000.
Srivastava, Marcus and Spielman solved long-standing questions on the Kadison-Singer drawback and on Ramanujan graphs, and within the course of uncovered a deep new connection between linear algebra, geometry of polynomials, and graph concept that has impressed the following era of theoretical laptop scientists, it mentioned.
They revealed new constructions of Ramanujan graphs, that describe sparse, however highly-connected networks, and an answer to what’s often known as the Kadison-Singer drawback, a decades-old drawback that asks whether or not distinctive info may be gleaned from a system through which solely among the options may be noticed or measured, based on the Yale information.
Srivastava is presently Associate Professor of Mathematics on the University of California.

Their groundbreaking papers on the questions, each revealed in 2015, solved issues that mathematicians had been engaged on for a number of many years, the National Academy of Sciences mentioned.
“Their proofs provided new tools to address numerous other problems, which have been embraced by other computer scientists seeking to apply the geometry of polynomials to solve discrete optimisation problems,” the academy mentioned.

The Michael and Sheila Held Prize is introduced yearly and honours excellent, modern, artistic, and influential analysis within the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimisation, or associated components of laptop science, such because the design and evaluation of algorithms and complexity concept.
The prize was established in 2017 by the bequest of Michael And Sheila Held.