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Peter Sarnak Receives 2005 AMS Cole Prize in Number Theory

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January 6, 2005

Providence, RI:

Peter Sarnak of Princeton University and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, is receiving the 2005 AMS Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory. Presented every three years by the American Mathematical Society, the Cole Prize is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics. The prize will be awarded today at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta, Georgia.

The prize recognizes Sarnak's fundamental contributions to number theory and in particular his book Random Matrices, Frobenius Eigenvalues and Monodromy, written jointly with his Princeton colleague Nicholas Katz. The philosophy the book presents has had a major impact on the direction of work in analytic number theory. In addition the prize is awarded for the papers "The non-vanishing of central values of automorphic L-functions and Landau-Siegel zeros" (with H. Iwaniec) and "Low lying zeros of families of L-functions" (with H. Iwaniec and W. Luo), in which this philosophy is tested in a more difficult specific case.

Find out more about AMS prizes at http://www.ams.org/prizes-awards.

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