A Celebration of Mathematics

On Friday, 6 September, ICTP celebrated mathematics with an afternoon of lectures and a prize ceremony that covered topics ranging from number theory to the application of algorithms to biology.

The prize ceremony honoured the recipient of the 2013 Ramanujan Prize, Ye Tian of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Tian has made outstanding contributions to number theory and delivered the Ramanujan Prize Lecture after being presented with the Prize.

The Ramanujan Prize is an award co-sponsored by ICTP and the International Mathematics Union (IMU) that is given annually to a mathematician under the age of 45 from a developing country.

Immediately prior to the award ceremony was a colloquium titled "Lovely Bones: A Meeting of Mathematical and Biological Minds", delivered by IMU President Ingrid Daubechies. In work that bridges mathematics and biology, Daubechies presented an algorithm that can speed up the process that biological morphologists use to compare different phenotypical structures, allowing them to do more comparisons of evolutionary patterns and relationships among living and extinct animals. Daubechies is the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics at Duke University, USA.