Zhiwei Yun

Bio

Zhiwei Yun joined MIT as a Professor since January 2018.

Yun received his Bachelor’s degree from Peking University in 2004, and the PhD degree from Princeton University in 2009, under the supervision of R.MacPherson. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study 2009-2010, and a CLE Moore Instructor at MIT 2010-2012. He had faculty appointments at Stanford and at Yale, before joining the MIT faculty.

Yun’s research is at the crossroads between algebraic geometry, number theory, and representation theory. He studies geometric structures aiming at solving problems in representation theory and number theory, especially those in the Langlands program. While he was a Moore Instructors at MIT, he started to develop the theory of rigid automorphic forms, and used it to answer an open question of J-P.Serre on motives, which also led to a major result on the inverse Galois problem in number theory. More recently, in his joint work with Wei Zhang, they give geometric interpretation of higher derivatives of automorphic L-functions in terms of intersection numbers, which sheds new light on the geometric analogue of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

Yun received the 2012 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, the 2013 Packard Fellowship, and the 2016 Morningside Silver Medal of Mathematics given by the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians. In December 2017, Yun and Wei Zhang received the 2018 New Horizons Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Yun was an invited speaker at ICM 2018. In 2019, Yun received the Gold Medal of Mathematics by the International Congress of Chinese Mathematics (formerly the Morningside Gold Medal). He was also selected to be Fellow of the AMS. In 2020, Zhiwei received a Simons Investigatorship in Mathematics.