The Clay Research Conference is returning to the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, with an in-person event on 28 September 2022. The plenary speakers will be Bhargav Bhatt, Igor Rodnianski, and Jacob Tsimerman. Associated workshops will be held throughout the week of the conference, 26-30 September: p-adic Hodge Theory and Applications (Bhargav Bhatt, Akhil Mathew); O-minimality and Diophantine Geometry (Gareth Jones, Alex Wilkie); Stability and Instability in General Relativity (Mihalis Dafermos, Elena Giorgi, Igor Rodnianski); Physics from the Point of View of Geometry (Ulrike Tillmann, Mike Hopkins).
Ziquan Zhuang obtained his PhD in 2019 from Princeton University, where he was advised by János Kollár. Since then he has been a Moore Instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Zhuang is a remarkably prolific and inventive algebraic geometer who has already made a series of fundamental contributions to higher dimensional birational geometry. These include his landmark solution, with Liu and Xu, of the higher rank finite generation conjecture, which is the final step in the Yau-Tian-Donaldson Conjecture in the case of general Fano varieties. With Xu, Zhuang proved the positivity of the CM line bundle on the K-moduli space; with Ahmadinezhad, he invented a new framework to verify the K-stability of a large class of Fano varieties; and with Stibitz he proved striking results on birational superrigidity and K-stability of Fano varieties.
Ziquan was appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of two years beginning 1 July 2022.
Hannah Larson will obtain her PhD in 2022 from Stanford University, where she has been advised by Ravi Vakil.
Displaying remarkable ingenuity, Larson has applied the modern techniques of degeneration and intersection theory to make significant advances in one of the classical areas of algebraic geometry – the geometry of complex curves and their moduli. Her papers bristle with surprising new ideas that attack classical problems. For example, searching for new perspectives on the space of vector bundles on the Riemann sphere, she proved striking results about the moduli space of curves and about stabilization forbranched covers of the sphere (with Canning), and extended Brill-Noether theory (which governs maps of general curves to projective space) to explain seemingly chaotic behaviour in the case of low-gonality curves (with E. Larson and Vogt).
Hannah was appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of five years beginning 1 July 2022.
Alexander Petrov will obtain his PhD in 2022 from Harvard University, where he has been advised by Mark Kisin.
Petrov has demonstrated exceptional creativity in proving surprising theorems concerning Galois representations and arithmetic local systems on algebraic varieties. Settling a conjecture of Litt, he proved that geometrically irreducible, arithmetic local systems on varieties over p-adic fields are essentially de Rham. He discovered a deep generalization of Belyi’s famous theorem, showing that any irreducible Galois representation which arises in the cohomology of an algebraic variety over a number field, appears in the space of algebraic functions on the fundamental group of the thrice punctured sphere. And he opened a new range of possibilities with counterexamples to a conjecture of Scholze on Hodge symmetry for rigid analytic varieties.
Alexander was appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of five years beginning 1 July 2022.
Amol Aggarwal received his PhD in 2020 from Harvard University, where he was advised by Alexei Borodin. His research lies largely in probability theory and combinatorics, as well as their connections to mathematical physics, integrable systems, and dynamical systems.
Aggarwal has already established himself as a powerful mathematician, resolving several longstanding conjectures of broad interest. His achievements to date include his proof of the local statistics conjecture for lozenge tilings, prescribing how local correlations for random tilings of large domains asymptotically depend on their boundary conditions. He also provided rigorous proofs for predicted phase transitions in the six-vertex model — a fundamental system from statistical mechanics — and for predicted asymptotic distributions in the one-dimensional asymmetric simple exclusion process, an important prototype for interacting particle systems. In a different direction, he proved the conjecture of Eskin and Zorich describing large genus asymptotics of the Masur-Veech volumes and the Siegel-Veech constants of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials.
Amol was appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of five years from 1 July 2020.
Antoine Song received his PhD in 2019 from Princeton University, where he has been working under the guidance of Fernando Codá Marques.
Song has already established himself as an expert in geometric analysis, solving longstanding problems of fundamental importance concerning the nature of minimal hypersurfaces in compact Riemannian manifolds. First he proved that in dimensions 3 to 7 the closed minimal hypersurface of least area in such a manifold is always embedded. Then, in joint work with Codá Marques and Neves, he showed that for generic metrics on closed manifolds in these dimensions, one can always find a sequence of minimal embedded hypersurfaces that become equidistributed in the sense that the average of the induced measures on the first n hypersurfaces in the sequence converges to the normalised volume measure on the ambient manifold as n tends to infinity. This was a dramatic improvement in the state of the art concerning a circle of problems inspired by Yau’s 1982 conjecture that every closed 3-dimensional Riemannian manifold contains infinitely many closed minimal surfaces. Building on work of Codá Marques and Neves, in 2018 Song proved Yau’s conjecture in complete generality.
Antoine was appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of five years beginning 1 July 2019.
Akhil Mathew received his PhD in 2017 from Harvard University under the supervision of Jacob Lurie. Previously he received an undergraduate degree from Harvard and studied at UC Berkeley for one year. His research focuses on homotopy theory, higher categories, and their applications, especially to derived algebraic geometry and algebraic K-theory. Some of his past work studied various generalizations of faithfully flat descent in stable homotopy theory and their role in describing certain invariants of structured ring spectra.
Akhil was appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of five years beginning 1 July 2017.
Maggie Miller obtained her PhD in 2020 from Princeton University, where she was advised by David Gabai. She is currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Miller has advanced the understanding of manifolds in dimensions 3 and 4 with her power and creativity, wielding a wide range of techniques — algebraic, combinatorial, geometric and topological. She has developed a theory of singular fibrations in 4-manifolds and used it to make significant progress on a 35 year old problem of Casson and Gordon: for a large class of fibered ribbon knots, she proves that the associated fibration of the 3-sphere extends over the closed complement of the ribbon disc in the 4-ball.
Her abundance of insight has made Miller a sought-after collaborator, working with a variety of co-authors to advance different aspects of low-dimensional topology: topological versus smooth isotopy for genus-1 surfaces in the 4-ball; taut foliations in 3-manifolds; concordance; trisections of 4-manifolds; diffeomorphisms of non-orientable 3-manifolds; and the use of knot Floer homology to give lower bounds on the bridge index of knots.
Maggie was appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of four years beginning 1 July 2021.