Professor Terence Tao, who holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the UCLA College, has been selected to receive the first Riemann Prize in Mathematics.
The prize was established this year by Italy’s Riemann International School of Mathematics, which promotes fundamental mathematical research and education, and will be awarded every three years to an outstanding mathematician selected by an international committee. The Riemann School is located within the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria at Villa Toeplitz in Varese, in Northern Italy, near the Swiss border.
The prize has the patronage of all public and private universities of Lombardia in northern Italy, and is co-sponsored by the University of Milano, University of Milano-Bicocca, the government of Regione Lombardia and the municipality of Varese.
The prize will be awarded to Tao in 2020, and will include a work of art made by Italian architect and sculptor Marcello Morandini.
Tao became the first mathematics professor in UCLA history to be awarded the Fields Medal in 2006, often described as the “Nobel Prize in mathematics.” He has earned many other honors, including the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, Royal Society’s 2014 Royal Medal for physical sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Crafoord Prize. National Geographic magazine featured him in its “What makes a genius?” May 2017 issue.
The Riemann International School of Mathematics is dedicated to Bernhard Riemann, an outstanding 19th century mathematician, for whom Riemann sums and integrals, the Riemann hypothesis, Riemannian geometry, Riemann surfaces and the Riemann sphere are all named. His work served as a crucial tool in Albert Einstein’s development of general relativity.
