A Celebration of Mathematics

ICTP will host the 2012 Ramanujan Prize ceremony on 6 September 2012, honoring the work of award recipient Fernando Codá Marques of Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The ceremony begins at 11:00 in the Main Lecture Hall of the Leonardo Building and is open to the public.

The prize recognizes Marques' outstanding contributions to differential geometry.  Marques' latest and perhaps most prominent work, done in collaboration with André Neves of Imperial College London, is a complete proof of the Willmore Conjecture. The Willmore Conjecture predicts the only equilibrium state of a curved surface with one hole--like a doughnut shape--subject to forces similar to those on soap bubbles, where the only forces considered are the surface tension and the amount of air contained in the soap film. The Willmore Conjecture has deep connections to fundamental questions in general relativity--the curvature of spacetime by gravity, for example--and also cell biology and lens design. The combined work of Marques and Neves offers a final proof. While the proof has yet to be published, there is so far a consensus among mathematicians studying it that Marques and Neves have proven the conjecture successfully.

For more details about this year's recipient, see this article. A full list of past recipients is here.

The Ramanujan Prize is funded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters through the Abel Board, with the cooperation of the International Mathematical Union (IMU).