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Chinese mathematician From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wei Zhang (Chinese: 张伟; born 1981) is a Chinese mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1]
Wei Zhang | |
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![]() Zhang at the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach in 2017 | |
Born | 1981 (age 42–43) |
Alma mater | Columbia University Peking University |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Columbia University |
Thesis | Modularity of Generating Functions of Special Cycles on Shimura Varieties (2009) |
Doctoral advisor | Shou-Wu Zhang |
Zhang grew up in Sichuan province and attended Chengdu No.7 High School. [2] He earned his B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in 2004 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2009 under the supervision of Shou-Wu Zhang.[3][4]
Zhang was a postdoctoral researcher and Benjamin Peirce Fellow at Harvard University from 2009 to 2011. He was a member of the mathematics faculty at Columbia University from 2011 to 2017, initially as an assistant professor before becoming a full professor in 2015. He has been a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2017.[4][5]
His collaborations with Zhiwei Yun, Xinyi Yuan and Xinwen Zhu have received attention in publications such as Quanta Magazine and Business Insider.[6][7] In particular, his work with Zhiwei Yun on the Taylor expansion of L-functions is "already being hailed as one of the most exciting breakthroughs in an important area of number theory in the last 30 years."[6]
Zhang has also made substantial contributions to the global Gan–Gross–Prasad conjecture.
He was a recipient of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2010, for "far-reaching contributions by himself and in collaboration with others to a broad range of areas in mathematics, including number theory, automorphic forms, L-functions, trace formulas, representation theory, and algebraic geometry.”[8] In 2013, Zhang received a Sloan Research Fellowship; in 2016 Zhang was awarded the Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics.[4][9] In December 2017 he was awarded 2018 New Horizons In Mathematics Prize together with Zhiwei Yun, Aaron Naber and Maryna Viazovska. In 2019 he received the Clay Research Award.[10]
He was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry and geometric representation theory".[11] He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.[12]