ICTP Prize Winner 2003

The 2003 ICTP Prize has been awarded to Manindra Agrawal from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India (presently, Member at the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA).

In 2002, Manindra Agrawal, working with two undergraduate students, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena, solved the problem of finding a polynomial-time algorithm for testing whether a given number is prime, the so called "Primality" problem. Together with the harder problem of Prime Factorization, Primality is a famous problem in computational complexity which also plays an important role in modern cryptography.

The Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena algorithm opens the possibility for speeding up mathematical computations in many areas of number theory and might lead to implementations that are competitive with the most sophisticated probabilistic methods.