University of Chicago mathematician Vladimir Drinfeld won the prestigious Shaw

Vladimir Drinfeld, Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, is one of two recipients of the prestigious Shaw Award in Mathematical Sciences for 2023.

He shared this year’s honor with Shing-Tung Yau of Tsinghua University for “their contributions to mathematical physics, arithmetic geometry, differential geometry and Kähler geometry.”

The Shaw Prize honors individuals who have recently made outstanding and significant advances in astronomy, life and medical sciences, and the mathematical sciences. Each category carries a whopping $1.2 million in prize money.

Awards noted that Drinfeld’s work is considered a “pillar of arithmetic geometry, which is at the core of new developments in the field.”

Drinfeld finds shtukas (from Part in German, meaning “part”) in resonance with the Korteweg-de Vries equation in physics and proved Langlands arithmetic conjecture of the field of function in second place, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal – often described as the mathematics counterpart to the Nobel Prize – in 1990. His research also includes work in representation theory, mathematical physics, and quantum group theory.

“Vladimir is a wonderful colleague,” said Shmuel Weinberger, the Andrew MacLeish Professor of Mathematics and chair of the UChicago mathematics department. “Many mathematical breakthroughs were initiated, presented and studied in the Langlands Geometric seminars made by him and Sasha Beilinson; it is a model of rigorous intellectual endeavor in the service of discovery through deep understanding. He is also a person who really cares about other people, as well as a very humble person.”

Drinfeld has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago since 1999. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an associated member of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.