Yale-alum Srivastava is a researcher at Microsoft.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Indian American mathematician Nikhil Srivastava has been named as a recipient of the 2014 George Polya Prize, an award given for outstanding work in the field of mathematics that is given out by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
Srivastava, who is currently a researcher at Microsoft, won the prize for his proof of a mathematical riddle known as the Kadison-Singer Problem. Despite having been deemed unsolvable for over 50 years, Srivastava – along with fellow researchers Adam Marcus and Daniel A. Spielman – proved it in a paper last summer, entitled “Interlacing Families II: Mixed Characteristic Polynomials and the Kadison-Singer Problem.”
“Not only have Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava proved an important conjecture, which has consequences in various areas of mathematics, but their elegant methods promise to be applicable to a broad range of other problems, as well,” said SIAM, in announcing the trio as the winner of the Polya Prize.
Named after famed Hungarian mathematician George Polya, the Poly Prize is considered one of the most prestigious awards in the field of mathematician, given out anywhere in the entire world. Srivastava and his two partners will receive the award during SIAM’s annual meeting, which began on Monday and ends on Friday in Chicago.
Srivastava attended Union College in Schnectady, New York for his undergraduate studies, graduate summa cum laude with a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science and a minor in English. He then did his Ph.D. at Yale University, earning it in Computer Science (Spielman was his advisor) for his dissertation on “Spectral Sparsification and Restricted Invertibility.”
He has held positions at both of the aforementioned schools, and also with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley.