Karim Adiprasito, BMS and FU Berlin alumnus, is one of five recipients of the 2019 New Horizons In Mathematics prizes. Karim was selected together with June Huh for their joint work with Eric Katz on the development of "combinatorial Hodge theory leading to the resolution of the log-concavity conjecture of Rota".

Karim did his PhD at the FU Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Günter M. Ziegler, and graduated with summa cum laude in May 2013. In 2014, this highly talented young academic received the Ernst Reuter Prize for his outstanding PhD dissertation, and in 2015 he was one of three young researchers to be honored with the European Prize in Combinatorics. After starting a postdoc position at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2014, Karim became an associate professor there in 2016. He now combines that with his most recent appointment as professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig, which he took up on a half-yearly basis in 2017.

The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize is part of the annual Breakthrough Prize series established and funded by Anne Wojcicki, Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and others. Three New Horizons prizes were awarded to five mathematicians for their early career achievements in their respective fields. Adiprasito and Huh will be awarded their prize at the 2019 Breakthrough Prize ceremony on 4 November 2018 in California. The ceremony will be hosted by actor, producer and philanthropist Pierce Brosnan and broadcast live on National Geographic. 

The former BMS Dirichlet Postdoctoral Fellow, Maryna Viazovska, who solved the sphere packing problem in dimension 8, was a winner of the New Horizons In Mathematics prize in 2018.

This prize comes with a monetary award in the sum of US $100,000.

Congratulations Karim and June!

Written by S. E. Sutherland-Figini

Source: Breakthrough Prize