extremely innovative work in solving the renowned “paving problem.” For their noteworthy contributions in Operator Theory, Srivastava, Adam Marcus, and Daniel Spielman will be honoured with the 2022 Ciprian Foias Prize on January 5, 2022 at the Joint Prize Session of the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle.
According to the American Mathematical Society, the prize honours their highly innovative work that originated and developed methods for comprehending the characteristic polynomial of matrices. According to a press statement, “The trio’s breakthrough paper provided a powerful toolkit with many applications, which solves the famous ‘paving problem” in operator theory, formulated by Richard Kadison and Isadore Singer in 1959”.
The trio, Srivastava, Marcus and Spielman, expressed delight at receiving the award. They said, “Our involvement was the final chapter of an amazing story we hope will inspire similar solutions to difficult problems in the future. Had it not been for a series of works over a span of decades, we would likely have never known about the Kadison–Singer problem. We were fortunate to have the groundbreaking work of Julius Borcea and Petter Brändén at our disposal, and a revolutionary idea from Leonid Gurvits as inspiration.”
Srivastava, an assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, attended Union College and is a graduate with a double major in mathematics and computer science and a minor in English. In 2010, he earned a PhD in computer science from Yale. Srivastava received his postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Princeton University. He joined Microsoft Research India in 2012, where he remained until 2014. He then joined Berkeley in 2014.
Srivastava disliked linear algebra when he was an undergraduate student. However, now he spends practically all of his time working on problems involving eigenvalues and eigenvectors in diverse situations. The Ciprian Foias Prize, which is presented once in three years, was founded in 2020 in honour of Ciprian Foias (1933–2020), a pioneer in operator theory and fluid mechanics.
