Carolina Araujo from Brazil becomes first non-Indian to win Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians

Carolina Araujo from Brazil became the first non-Indian to win Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians 2020 in a virtual ceremony on December 9, 2020. Araujo is a Mathematician at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

Dr. Araujo has been awarded for her outstanding work in algebraic geometry. Professor Ashutosh Sharma, while informing about the new programmes for women such as ‘Vigyan Jyoti’ which is initiated by the Department of Science and Technology, invited Dr. Araujo to India for encouraging women mathematicians and to inspire them.

During the award ceremony, Dr. Araujo talked about algebraic geometry, including foliations in the talk titled ‘Algebraic Varieties with Positive Tangent Bundles’ and birational geometry.

2020 Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians awarded to Dr. Carolina Araujo from Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IMPA), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.@drharshvardhan @Ashutos61 @IndiaDST @skvdst1 @ictpnews https://t.co/8YHrFIha6a pic.twitter.com/u1R52kPByk

— DSTIndia (@IndiaDST) December 10, 2020

Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematician:

Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematician is given annually to a researcher from a developing country. The prize is funded by the Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology in association with the International Mathematical Union and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics.

The prize is supported by DST in the memory of Srinivasa Ramanujan who was a genius in pure mathematics and was essentially self-taught. He made spectacular contributions to the continued fractions, elliptic functions, analytical theory of numbers, and infinite series.

Who is honored with the prestigious prize?

Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematician is given every year to young mathematicians who are less than 45 years of age. They must be conducting outstanding research in a developing country.

About Carolina Araujo:

She is a Brazilian mathematician who specializes in algebraic geometry, including foliations, birational geometry, and fano varieties. Ms. Araujo did undergraduate studies in Brazil and completed a degree in Mathematics in 1998.

Carolina Araujo did her Ph.D. in 2004 at Princeton University, where her dissertation titled ‘The Variety of Tangents to Rational Curves’, was supervised by Jonas Kollar.

She is also a Vice President of the Committee for Women in Mathematics at the International Mathematical Union and her work area focuses on birational geometry which aims at classifying and describing the structure of the algebraic varieties.

During and after her Ph.D., she developed techniques that are related to the theory of rational curves of minimal degree proposed by the Japanese mathematician Shigefumi Mori. She published it in 2008.