Shai Evra awarded Sastra Ramanujan Prize 2020

NEW DELHI: Sastra University (Deemed) has awarded the 2020 Sastra Ramanujan prize to Dr. SHAI EVRA of Princeton University, USA, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. The prize has been awarded for his outstanding work on high dimensional expanders in the area of combinatorial and geometric topology, and on “Golden Gates” for three dimensional unitary groups. The prize notes that he employs deep results from representation theory and number theory pertaining to the Generalized Ramanujan Conjectures. The prize recognizes his fundamental paper in the Journal of Topology and Analysis in which he extends both the combinatorics and automorphic form theory to generalize the construction of Gromov and others on expander graphs.

The prize is awarded annually at an International Conference in Number Theory during December 21-22, at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam (Ramanujan’s hometown) in South India. Since the conference will not take place in December 2020, Dr. Evra will receive the prize in 2021 in Kumbakonam at a suitable date.

Shai Evra is an extraordinarily gifted mathematician whose research concerns locally symmetric spaces of arithmetic groups and their combinatorial, geometric, and topological structure. He employs deep results from representation theory and number theory pertaining to the Ramanujan and Langlands conjectures to establish expander-like properties.

Sha Evra was born in Be’er Yaakov, Israel. He received his BSc, MSc, and PhD (2019) degrees from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His MSc and PhD advisor was Professor Alexander Lubotzky. He has been recognized with several prizes, most notably the Hebrew University Dean’s Prize in 2010, the Perlman Prize in 2015, and the Nessyahu Prize in 2020. He spent the years 2018-20 as a Visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and is spending this year (2020-21) at Princeton University, following which he will return to the Hebrew University permanently.

The 2020 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee comprised: Krishnaswami Alladi - Chair (University of Florida), Willam Duke (University of California, Los Angeles), Kevin Ford (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Anne Schilling (University of California, Davis), Robert Tijdeman (Leiden University), Maryna Viazovska (Ecole Polytechnique, Lausanne), and Shouwu Zhang (Princeton University). Evra, who was the overwhelming choice of the Committee for the 2020 award, joins the illustrious group of winners of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize.