Ana Caraiani (born 1985) is a

Romanian-American Romanian Americans are Americans who have Romanian ancestry. According to the 2017 American Community Survey, 478,278 Americans indicated Romanian as their first or second ancestry, however other sources provide higher estimates, which are most ...

mathematician, who is a

Royal Society University Research Fellow __NOTOC__ The Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) is a research fellowship awarded to outstanding early career scientists in the United Kingdom who are judged by the Royal Society to have the potential to become leaders in their fie ...

and Professor of Pure Mathematics at

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

. Her research interests include

algebraic number theory Algebraic number theory is a branch of number theory that uses the techniques of abstract algebra to study the integers, rational numbers, and their generalizations. Number-theoretic questions are expressed in terms of properties of algebraic ob ...

and the

Langlands program In representation theory and algebraic number theory, the Langlands program is a web of far-reaching and influential conjectures about connections between number theory and geometry. Proposed by , it seeks to relate Galois groups in algebraic num ...

Education

She was born in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north of ...

and studied at

Mihai Viteazul High School Mihai () is a Romanian given name for males or a surname. It is equivalent to the English name Michael. A variant of the name is Mihail. Its female form is Mihaela. As a given name *Mihai I of Romania (1921–2017), King of Romania until 1947 *Miha ...

. In 2001, Caraiani became the first Romanian female competitor in 15 years at the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except i ...

, where she won a silver medal. In the following two years, she won two gold medals.. After graduating high school in 2003, she pursued her studies in the United States. As an undergraduate student at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

, Caraiani was a two-time

Putnam Fellow The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada (regard ...

(the only female competitor at the

William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual list of mathematics competitions, mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in th ...

to win more than once) and

Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Elizabeth Lowell Putnam (2 February 1862–1935) was an American philanthropist and an activist for prenatal care. She was born (as Bessie Lowell) in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member o ...

Award winner. Caraiani graduated ''

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sou ...

'' from Princeton in 2007, with an undergraduate thesis on

Galois representations In mathematics, a Galois module is a ''G''-module, with ''G'' being the Galois group of some extension of fields. The term Galois representation is frequently used when the ''G''-module is a vector space over a field or a free module over a ring i ...

supervised by

Andrew Wiles Sir Andrew John Wiles (born 11 April 1953) is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awar ...

. Caraiani did her graduate studies at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

under the supervision of Wiles' student Richard Taylor, earning her Ph.D. in 2012 with a dissertation concerning local-global compatibility in the

Langlands correspondence In representation theory and algebraic number theory, the Langlands program is a web of far-reaching and influential conjectures about connections between number theory and geometry. Proposed by , it seeks to relate Galois groups in algebraic num ...

Career

After spending a year as an L.E. Dickson Instructor at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, she returned to Princeton and the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

as a Veblen Instructor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2016, she moved to the

Hausdorff Center for Mathematics The Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM) is a research center in Bonn, formed by the four mathematical institutes of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Mathematical Institute, Institute for Applied Mathematics, Institute for ...

as a Bonn Junior Fellow. She moved to

in 2017 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer. In 2019, she became a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader at Imperial College London. As of 2021, Caraiani is a full professor at Imperial College London.

Research

Caraiani's research work includes the papers "Patching and the p-adic local Langlands correspondence" (2016), "On the generic part of the cohomology of compact unitary Shimura varieties" (2017) with

Peter Scholze Peter Scholze (; born 11 December 1987) is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012 and director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He ha ...

, and "Potential automorphy over CM fields" (2023),. These three papers all happen to be directly related to the Langlands program, but she does have other interests. Caraiani discusses the Langlands program from a more general perspective in the survey article "New frontiers in Langlands reciprocity".

Recognition

In 2007, the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

awarded Caraiani their

Alice T. Schafer Prize The Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize is given annually to an undergraduate woman for excellence in mathematics by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). The prize, which carries a monetary award, is named for former AWM president and fou ...

.Seventeenth Annual Alice T. Schafer Prize

, retrieved December 30, 2014. In 2018, she was one of the winners of the

Whitehead Prize The Whitehead Prize is awarded yearly by the London Mathematical Society to multiple mathematicians working in the United Kingdom who are at an early stage of their career. The prize is named in memory of homotopy theory pioneer J. H. C. Whiteh ...

of the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

. She was elected as a

Fellow of the American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

in the 2020 Class, for "contributions to arithmetic geometry and number theory, in particular the

p

-adic Langlands program". She is one of the 2020 winners of the

EMS Prize The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The current ...

. In September 2022 she was awarded the 2023 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize.

References

External links

Caraiani's scores at the IMOProfessional home pagePersonal home page
(in Romanian) {{DEFAULTSORT:Caraiani, Ana 1985 births Living people Scientists from Bucharest Number theorists 21st-century Romanian mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians American women mathematicians Romanian women mathematicians Romanian emigrants to the United States International Mathematical Olympiad participants Putnam Fellows Princeton University alumni Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Academics of Imperial College London Whitehead Prize winners Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Institute for Advanced Study people 21st-century American women