“Once again, the Gumin Prize is going in 2024 to a mathematician who has been outstanding in his specialist field for decades,” says Thomas O. Höllmann, Chairperson of the Foundation Board. “Besides number theory and the theory of modular forms, Don Zagier’s research also extends to topology, which even provides something of an overlap with the early work of Heinz Gumin himself, after whom this prize is named. We’d like to thank our panel of experts, without whose painstaking research we’d simply not be in a position to award this prize.”
Born in Heidelberg in 1951, Don Zagier earned his doctorate in Oxford at just 20 years old before going on to do his Habilitation at the University of Bonn. He became Germany’s youngest professor on his appointment at the University of Bonn—his alma mater—in 1976 as well as being a member of its Theoretical Mathematics Collaborative Research Center. He collaborated with Benedict Gross on research into the L-functions of elliptic curves in the 1980s, work that led in 1986 to a solution being found to the Gauss class number problem for imaginary quadratic number fields. Don Zagier was one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn from 1995 to 2019. The scientist is an associate member of the Cluster of Excellence Hausdorff Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn. The accolades that he has won include the 1987 Cole Prize and the 2001 Karl Georg Christian von Staudt Prize. The Gumin Prize will be presented at a ceremony at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in mid-May 2024.
The Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung’s Heinz Gumin Prize for Mathematics is awarded every three to four years to an exceptional mathematician in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. It was inaugurated in 2010 and is named after the mathematician and computer scientist Heinz Gumin (1928–2008), who chaired the executive committee of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung for over 20 years. The Gumin Prize is worth €50,000, making it the most generous award for mathematics in Germany. The most recent recipient was Wolfgang Hackbusch in 2020, following in the footsteps of Gerd Faltings in 2010, Stefan Müller in 2013 and Wendelin Werner in 2016.
More information: https://www.cfvss.de/foerderung/forschungsfoerderung/gumin-preis-fuer-mathematik/