Wei Zhang

The 2019 Clay Research Award to Wei Zhang (MIT) is made in recognition of his ground-breaking work in arithmetic geometry and arithmetic aspects of automorphic forms.

His landmark contributions include a proof of the global Gan-Gross-Prasad conjecture for a wide class of automorphic representations of unitary groups, a proof with Zhiwei Yun of a higher-order generalization of the Gross-Zagier formula over function fields, and a proof of Kolyvagin’s conjecture on the structure of Selmer groups for a large class of elliptic curves over Q. 

He has formulated an arithmetic version of the Gan-Gross-Prasad Conjecture –a vision for a far-reaching generalization of the Gross-Zagier formula over number fields – and pioneered a relative trace formula approach to its proof.He recently achieved a major step in this program by proving the Arithmetic Fundamental Lemma.

Image courtesy of Allegra Boverman