Kannan Soundararajan

Kannan Soundararajan
Soundararajan teaching at Stanford University
Born	(1973-12-27) December 27, 1973
Alma mater	University of Michigan<br /> Princeton University
Awards	Ostrowski Prize (2011)<br /> Infosys Prize (2011)<br /> SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2005)<br />Salem Prize (2003)<br />Morgan Prize (1995)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Stanford University<br /> University of Michigan
Doctoral advisor	Peter Sarnak
Doctoral students	Sarah Peluse Maksym Radziwill

Kannan Soundararajan (born December 27, 1973)<ref name="Notices AMS September 2013 - Election Material"><!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> (January 2019). "2013 AMS Elections - Special Section" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 60 (8): 1085. ISSN 1088-9477. Retrieved 2024-03-02.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)</ref> is an Indian-born American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Before moving to Stanford in 2006, he was a faculty member at University of Michigan, where he had also pursued his undergraduate studies. His main research interest is in analytic number theory, particularly in the subfields of automorphic L-functions, and multiplicative number theory.

Early life

Template:BLP unreferenced section Soundararajan grew up in Chennai and was a student at Padma Seshadri High School in Nungambakkam in Chennai. In 1989, he attended the Research Science Institute. He represented India at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1991 and won a Silver Medal.

Education

Soundararajan joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1991 for undergraduate studies, and graduated with highest honours in 1995. Soundararajan won the inaugural Morgan Prize in 1995 for his work in analytic number theory while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan,<ref>AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 43 (1996), no. 3, pp. 323–324</ref> where he later served as professor. He joined Princeton University in 1995 and did his Ph.D under the guidance of Professor Peter Sarnak.

Career

After his Ph.D. he received the first five-year fellowship from the American Institute of Mathematics, and held positions at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Michigan. He moved to Stanford University in 2006 where he is, as of November 2022,<ref name="Stanford Mathematics Kannan Soundararajan">"Kannan Soundararajan". Mathematics. Retrieved 2022-11-12.</ref> the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Mathematics.

He provided a proof<ref name="Balasubramanian Soundararajan Graham conjecture">Balasubramanian, R.; Soundararajan, K. (1996). "On a conjecture of R. L. Graham". Acta Arithmetica. 75 (1): 1–38. doi:10.4064/aa-75-1-1-38. ISSN 0065-1036. Retrieved 2022-11-12.</ref> of a conjecture of Ron Graham in combinatorial number theory jointly with Ramachandran Balasubramanian. He made contributions in settling the arithmetic Quantum Unique Ergodicity conjecture<ref name="Soundararajan 2010 QUE">Soundararajan, Kannan (2010). "Quantum unique ergodicity for SL₂(ℤ)\ℍ". Annals of Mathematics. 172 (2): 1529–1538. doi:10.4007/annals.2010.172.1529. ISSN 0003-486X. S2CID 15626593.</ref> for Maass wave forms and modular forms.

Awards

He received the Salem Prize in 2003 "for contributions to the area of Dirichlet L-functions and related character sums". In 2005, he won the $10,000 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, shared with Manjul Bhargava, awarded by SASTRA in Thanjavur, India, for his outstanding contributions to number theory.<ref>"The First SASTRA Ramanujan Prizes". Archived from the original on 2011-07-26. Retrieved 2011-04-24.</ref> In 2011, he was awarded the Infosys science foundation prize.<ref>"Infosys Prize - Laureates 2011 - Prof. Kannan Soundararajan".</ref> He was awarded the Ostrowski prize<ref>Ostrowski Prize</ref> in 2011, shared with Ib Madsen and David Preiss, for a cornucopia of fundamental results in the last five years to go along with his earlier work.

He gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Number Theory".<ref>"ICM Plenary and Invited Speakers since 1897". International Congress of Mathematicians. Archived from the original on 2017-11-08. Retrieved 2013-08-15.</ref> In July 2017, Soundararajan was a plenary lecturer in the Mathematical Congress of the Americas.<ref>"Mathematical Congress of the Americas 2017".</ref> He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.<ref>2018 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2017-11-03</ref> Kannan Soundararajan was invited as a plenary speaker<ref name="ICM 2022 plenary lecture Soundararajan">"ICM 2022". ICM 2022. Retrieved 2022-11-12.</ref> of the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians, scheduled to take place in Saint Petersburg, but moved to Helsinki and online because of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Selected publications

• R. Holowinsky and K. Soundararajan, "Mass equidistribution for Hecke eigenforms," arXiv:0809.1636v1
• K. Soundararajan, "Nonvanishing of quadratic Dirichlet L-functions at s=1/2" arXiv:math/9902163v2
• K. Soundararajan, "Moments of the Riemann zeta function" https://annals.math.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/annals-v170-n2-p17-p.pdf

External links

• Homepage at Stanford University
• Making Waves
• Kannan Soundararajan at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Template:IMO results
• Infosys Prize 2011
• Videos of Kannan Soundararajan in the AV-Portal of the German National Library of Science and Technology