Peter Sarnak | |
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| Born | Peter Clive Sarnak (1953-12-18)18 December 1953 (age 71) Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Nationality | South Africa[1] United States[1] |
| Alma mater | University of the Witwatersrand (BSc) Stanford University (PhD) |
| Known for | Systolic geometry Hafner–Sarnak–McCurley constant |
| Awards | George Pólya Prize (1998) Ostrowski Prize (2001) Levi L. Conant Prize (2003) Cole Prize (2005) Wolf Prize (2014) Sylvester Medal (2019) Shaw Prize (2024) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Courant Institute New York University Stanford University Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study |
| Thesis | Prime geodesic theorems (1980) |
| Doctoral advisor | Paul Cohen[1][2] |
| Doctoral students | |
| Website | www |
Peter Clive SarnakFRS MAE[3] (born 18 December 1953) is a South African and American mathematician.[1] Sarnak has been a member of the permanent faculty of the School of Mathematics at theInstitute for Advanced Study since 2007.[4] He is also Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics atPrinceton University since 2002, succeedingSir Andrew Wiles, and is an editor of theAnnals of Mathematics. He is known for his work inanalytic number theory.[4] He was member of the Board of Adjudicators and for one period chairman of the selection committee for the Mathematics award, given under the auspices of theShaw Prize.
Sarnak is the grandson of one of Johannesburg's rabbis and lived in Israel for three years as a child. He graduated from theUniversity of the Witwatersrand (BSc 1975, BSc(Hons) 1976) andStanford University (PhD 1980), under the direction ofPaul Cohen.[1][2] Sarnak's work (withA. Lubotzky andR. Phillips) applied results innumber theory toRamanujan graphs, with connections tocombinatorics andcomputer science.
Sarnak has made contributions to analysis and number theory.[3] He is recognised as one of the leading analytic number theorists of his generation.[3] His early work on the existence of cusp forms led to the disproof of a conjecture ofAtle Selberg.[3] He has obtained the strongest known bounds towards theRamanujan–Petersson conjectures for sparse graphs, and was one of the first to exploit connections between certain questions of theoretical physics and analytic number theory.[3]
There are fundamental contributions toarithmetical quantum chaos, a term which he introduced, and to the relationship between random matrix theory and the zeros ofL-functions.[3] His work on subconvexity forRankin–Selberg L-functions led to the resolution ofHilbert's eleventh problem.[3]
During his career he has held numerous appointments including:
Peter Sarnak was awarded:
The University of the Witwatersrand conferred an honorary doctorate on Professor Peter Sarnak on 2 July 2014 for his distinguished contribution to the field of mathematics.
He was an invited speaker at theInternational Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 1990 in Kyoto[9] and a plenary speaker at the ICM in 1998 in Berlin.[10]
Sarnak has been a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991.He was also elected as member of theNational Academy of Sciences (USA) andFellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2002.[3] He became a member of theAmerican Philosophical Society in 2008.[11] He was awarded an honorary doctorate by theHebrew University of Jerusalem in 2010.[12] He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by theUniversity of Chicago in 2015 and byStockholm University in 2023.[13][14] He was elected to the 2018 class offellows of theAmerican Mathematical Society.[15] In 2019 he became the 10th non-British citizen to ever be awarded theSylvester Medal of the Royal Society.[7]
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