1998 AIM Five-Year Fellow
The American Institute of Mathematics is pleased to announce
that the recipient of the AIM Five-Year Fellowship
is Kannan Soundararajan of
Princeton University.
As part of the Fellowship he will receive 60 months of
full-time research support.
Soundararajan completed his PhD under the direction of Professor Peter Sarnak at Princeton University in 1998 in the area of Number Theory.
In his thesis, Soundararajan proves that a positive proportion of quadratic twists of
a Dirichlet L-function associated to a non-real primitive character are non-zero at the center of the critical strip.
This work is an important step toward understanding the behavior of L-functions, the central objects of modern number theory.
In addition to his thesis work, Soundararajan has published more than 10 papers on a variety of topics in number theory, including fundamental work on the Riemann zeta-function, a solution (with R. Balasubramanian) to an outstanding problem of R. Graham, and, together with K. Ono, a solution (depending on relevant Riemann Hypotheses) to Ramanujan's question about which integers are representable by the ternary quadratic form x^2 +y^2 +10 z^2.