December 22, Kumbakonam.
As 2016 came to a close, our Department made headlines in India when Maksym Radziwill received the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (jointly with Kaisa Matomaki) at a ceremony in Kumbakonam, Ramanujan's home town in Tamil Nadu. The ceremony was timed to coincide with Ramanujan's birthday and the national day of mathematics in India. Among the officials present were Krishnaswami Alladi from the University of Central Florida, Steven Weintraub, Secretary of the AMS, and Henri Darmon, who as Maksym's colleague at McGill was given the pleasant task of opening the prize ceremony.
Ever since its inception in 2005, the Ramanujan Prize has become the leading international recognition for number theorists in the early stages of their careers, and the list of previous recipients includes two former and at least one future Fields medallist, as well as many of the leading lights in the subject of the past decade.
Maksym's landmark achievement with Matomaki was also featured more recently in a "Current Events" lecture delivered by Soundararajan Kannan from Stanford, at the Annual AMS-MAA Joint Meetings in Atlanta on January 6, 2017. This colloquium style lecture, which was attended by close to 1000 participants, explained how the ideas of Kaisa and Maksym were instrumental in Terence Tao's recent solution of the Erdos discrepancy problem.
Henri Darmon