Wei Zhang Receives Clay Research Award
Wei Zhang received the 2019 Clay Research Award, in recognition of his work in arithmetic geometry and arithmetic aspects of automorphic forms . Presented by the Clay Mathematics Institute , the award notes his “landmark contributions” that include a proof of the global Gan-Gross-Prasad conjecture for a wide class of automorphic representations of unitary groups, a proof he did 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 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.
The award was presented to Wei Zhang at the Clay Research Conference in Oxford in October 2019. In 2017, Wei was awarded the 2018 New Horizons in Mathematics Breakthrough Prize with Zhiwei Yun.
Congratulations Wei!