Kaisa Matomäki Receives New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
Academy Research Fellow Kaisa Matomäki from the University of Turku receives the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize as a recognition for her fundamental scientific breakthroughs with prime numbers. The New Horizons Prize is $100,000 and Matomäki shares the prize with Professor Maksym Radziwill from the California Institute of Technology.
Kaisa Matomäki and Maksym Radziwill are awarded for their breakthrough research on the understanding of local correlations of values of multiplicative functions. The Board of the Breakthrough Prize awards the prizes in November 2018.
The New Horizons Prize is awarded to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work. Each year, up to three New Horizons in Physics Prizes and up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes are awarded. The prizes in mathematics are funded by a grant from Mark Zuckerberg’s fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and a grant from the Milner Foundation.
– Professor Radziwill and I have succeeded in understanding local correlations of values of multiplicative functions even better than previously thought possible. Thanks to this research, we and other researchers have managed to prove many new results, for example, on the conjecture of Chowla that applies to the correlation of consecutive values of the Liouville function.
Matomäki and Radziwill have collaborated since 2013. 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 problems.
Matomäki is one of the world's top young researchers in analytical number theory. 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 top-class publications focusing on the central questions of number theory.
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.
In addition, Matomäki and Radziwill received the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2016 for their research collaboration on the average values of multiplicative functions in short intervals.
More information:
>> Breakthrough Prize: https://breakthroughprize.org/
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Photo: Hanna Oksanen