Kaisa Matomäki and Maksym Radziwill were chosen as the recipients of the award for their research collaboration on the average values of multiplicative functions in short intervals. The most important example of their research subjects is the Liouville function, the average values of which are linked to, for example, the division of prime numbers and to the Riemann hypothesis which is one of the world's most significant unresolved mathematical problems.
– We succeeded to prove with Radziwill that if we take a suitable and rather "small" amount of consecutive numbers, most likely a half of them have an even and the other half an odd number of prime factors. Surprising mathematical applications have already been found for the results and techniques. In addition, the results have connections to questions related to cryptography, tells Matomäki.
Award-winning International Collaboration Continues
Collaboration with Maksym Radziwill started in 2013.
– We had a conversation after my presentation in a conference about how to improve my result. We continued our collaboration via email and started to generalise the result we calculated. We both spent the autumn 2014 in Montréal in the Center de Recherches Mathématiques where a thematic semester of analytical number theory was taking place back then. A generalisation, which was better than what we could have expected, was created as a result of this collaborative period.
Matomäki completed her Master's degree at the University of Turku in 2005. After completing her dissertation at the Royal Holloway College in London, Matomäki returned to the University of Turku to work as a researcher. At the moment, Matomäki is an Academy Research Fellow and continues her work with prime numbers.
Next spring, Matomäki will work as a visiting researcher at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley where she gets to work with Radziwill and other research partners.
– Number theory research has strong traditions at the University of Turku, but our research group is rather small. My goal is to slowly grow it, and international contacts are extremely important. As an Academy Research Fellow, I have great freedom to do research, says Matomäki.
Award-winning Researcher Has Significantly Improved the Results of the Field
The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize has been awarded since 2005. The prize is awarded by an Indian SASTRA University in Kubakonam which is the home town of the mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who died at the age 32.
The prize will be awarded in December 2016. Matomäki and Radziwill will share the $10,000 grant.
They have been chosen as the recipients of the prize based on their collaboration but also on their individual achievements as researchers. Matomäki is one of the world's strongest young analytical number theorists. Matomäki, born in 1985, became internationally known in her field in 2007–2009 when she published significant research results in approximately ten research articles.
Since then, Matomäki has released around thirty first rate publications focusing on the central questions of number theory. With her research results that span several fields, Matomäki has significanlty improved the earlier works of eminent number theorists.
Text: Taru Suhonen
Translation: Saara Yli-Kauhaluoma
Photo: Pekka Matomäki
