The Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences is proud to announce Vesselin Dimitrov to be the laureate of the IMI Mathematics Prize for the year 2023 for excellent achievements in Mathematics.
He receives this recognition for his outstanding contributions to number theory and Diophantine geometry.
The IMI award for 2023 was presented to Dr. Vesselin Dimitrov on July 10, 2023, during the opening of the International Conference “Mathematics Days in Sofia 2023”. The prize was presented by Prof. Julian Revalski, President of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the Prize Committee, and was personally delivered by the President of the Republic of Bulgaria, Rumen Radev.
Vesselin Dimitrov was born in Sofia in 1986. He graduated from the National Gymnasium of Natural Sciences and Mathematics “Academician Lyubomir Chakalov”. In 2003, he was chosen to represent Bulgaria in the prestigious six-week summer school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Research Science Institute (RSI). In 2005, he participated in the International Mathematics Olympiad, where he won a silver medal.
Dr. Dimitrov continued his education at Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 2010 with a thesis under the supervision of Prof. Barry Mazur. He received his MA (2014) and PhD (2017) from Yale University. His academic supervisor was Prof. Alexander Goncharov. Dr. Dimitrov is currently a member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. In 2022 Dr. Dimitrov was awarded the Oberwolfach Prize for “his outstanding contribution to number theory and Diophantine geometry” and with the David Gross Prize (which he shared with Ziyang Gao).
Vesselin Dimitrov works in the field of number theory, Diophantine geometry, and related problems from algebraic geometry, representation theory and harmonic analysis. He proved two famous and very difficult conjectures from the 1970s: The Schinzel-Zassenhaus conjecture for algebraic units close to the unit circle and the “unbounded denominators” conjecture, which concerns incongruent modular forms and which he proved together with Yunqing Tang and Frank Calageri. Another significant contribution of Vesselin Dimitrov, Ziyang Gao and Philipp Habegger is the proof of a uniform bound for the number of rational points of a curve X of genus g>1, which depends only on g and the rank of the Mordell-Weil group of the Jacobian of X.
About the Prize
For the first time, the Prize was awarded in 2014 to Martin Kassabov, a Professor at the University of Cornell, USA. In 2017, during the International Conference Mathematics Days in Sofia, the prestigious award was presented to Kiril Dachev, professor of mathematics at Purdue University, USA. The first woman recipient of the IMI Award is Greta Panova, associate professor at the University of Southern California, USA, who received the award in 2020. More about the laureates read here.
The IMI award is a metal statuette, accompanied by a diploma and a cash prize. Funds for the premium are raised through donations. Details about the Prize and the nominations procedure can be found in the Statute of the Prize.
