Henryk Iwaniec

Henryk Iwaniec
Born October 9, 1947
Elbląg, Poland
Residence United States
Citizenship United States
Fields Mathematician
Institutions Polish Academy of Sciences
Institute for Advanced Study
Rutgers University
Alma mater University of Warsaw
Doctoral advisor Andrzej Schinzel
Known for analytic number theory
Friedlander–Iwaniec theorem
automorphic forms
Sieve theory
Notable awards 2001 Ostrowski Prize
2002 Cole Prize
2011 Steele Prize

Henryk Iwaniec (born October 9, 1947) is a Polish American mathematician, and since 1987 a professor at Rutgers University.

Background and education

Iwaniec studied at the University of Warsaw, where he got his Ph.D. in 1972 under Andrzej Schinzel. He then held positions at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences until 1983 when he left Poland. He held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Michigan, and University of Colorado at Boulder before being appointed Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is a citizen of both Poland and the United States. [1]

He and mathematician Tadeusz Iwaniec are twin brothers.

Work

Iwaniec studies both sieve methods and deep complex-analytic techniques, with an emphasis on the theory of automorphic forms and harmonic analysis.

In 1997, Iwaniec and John Friedlander proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form a^2 + b^4.[2][3] Results of this strength had previously been seen as completely out of reach: sieve theory—used by Iwaniec and Friedlander in combination with other techniques—cannot usually distinguish between primes and products of two primes, say.

In 2001 Iwaniec was awarded the seventh Ostrowski Prize.[4] The prize citation read, in part, "Iwaniec's work is characterized by depth, profound understanding of the difficulties of a problem, and unsurpassed technique. He has made deep contributions to the field of analytic number theory, mainly in modular forms on GL(2) and sieve methods."[4]

Awards and honors

He was awarded the fourteenth Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory in 2002. He received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2011. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[5]

Publications

References

  1. "2002 Cole Prize in Number Theory" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Providence: American Mathematical Society) 49 (4): 476–478. April 2002. ISSN 0002-9920.
  2. Friedlander, John; Iwaniec, Henryk (1997). "Using a parity-sensitive sieve to count prime values of a polynomial". PNAS 94 (4): 1054–1058. doi:10.1073/pnas.94.4.1054. PMC 19742. PMID 11038598..
  3. Friedlander, John; Iwaniec, Henryk (1998). "The polynomial X2 + Y4 captures its primes" (PDF). Annals of Mathematics (Annals of Mathematics) 148 (3): 945–1040. doi:10.2307/121034. JSTOR 121034.
  4. 4.0 4.1 "Iwaniec, Sarnak, and Taylor Receive Ostrowski Prize"
  5. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-01-26.

Further reading

External links