Matomäki, Radziwill to share $100,000 Mathematics Prize

Academy Research Fellow Kaisa Matomäki from the University of Turku and Professor Maksym Radziwill from the California Institute of Technology jointly will receive the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize as a recognition for their fundamental scientific breakthroughs with prime numbers.

The New Horizons Prize is $100,000, will be awarded by the Board of the Breakthrough Prize awards in November this year, said a press release issued by the University of Turku.

Matomäki and Radziwill are awarded for their breakthrough research on the understanding of local correlations of values of multiplicative functions.

The New Horizons Prize is awarded to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work.

Each year, up to three New Horizons in Physics Prizes and up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes are awarded. The prizes in mathematics are funded by a grant from Mark Zuckerberg’s fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and a grant from the Milner Foundation.

Matomäki and Radziwill have collaborated since 2013. The most important example of their research subjects is the Liouville function, the average values of which are linked to, for example, the division of prime numbers and to the Riemann hypothesis which is one of the world's most significant unresolved problems.

Matomäki, one of the world's top young researchers in analytical number theory was born in 1985 and became internationally known in her field in 2007–2009 when she published significant research results in approximately ten research articles.

She completed her Master's degree at the University of Turku in 2005. After completing her dissertation at the Royal Holloway College in London, Matomäki returned to the University of Turku to work as a researcher. At the moment, Matomäki is an Academy Research Fellow and continues her work with prime numbers.

Earlier, Matomäki and Radziwill received the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2016 for their research collaboration on the average values of multiplicative functions in short intervals.