Vesselin Dimitrov
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Vesselin Dimitrov is 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.

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 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.

Members of the International Committee for the Award:

Julian Revalski, President of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria and Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria – Chairman of the Prize Committee
Gilles Godefroy, CNRS, France
Martin Kassabov, University of Cornell, USA
Ludmil Katzarkov, University of Miami, USA and Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
Edward Saff, Vanderbilt University, USA, Foreign Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

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”.

Greta Panova
University of Southern California, USA

Greta Panova, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, is the recipient of the 2020 Award of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics.

Greta Panova was born in Sofia. She graduated from the Sofia National High School of Science and Mathematics “Academician Lyubomir Chakalov”. As a student she participated in three International Mathematical Olympiads  (in Romania in 1999, in South Korea in 2000 and in the United States in 2001) and won two silver and one gold medal.

In 2005, she received a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2006 she earned a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2011 got her PhD degree at Harvard under Richard Stanley.

Greta Panova won the Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California in Los Angeles for the period 2011-2014 and in the meantime was a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Berkeley (MSRI), and in 2014-2018 she was a senior assistant and associate professor at University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Southern California. She was a visiting professor at the Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris in 2017, a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a visiting scientist at the Simon’s Institute for Computational Theory in Berkeley in 2018 and the Mittag-Lefler Institute in Stockholm in 2020=

Greta Panova works in the field of algebraic combination and its applications in the geometric theory of computability, the theory of probabilities and statistical mechanics. She is the author of about 40 scientific articles, including publications in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Advances in Mathematics, Annals of Probability. Much of her work is implemented with the theory of representation of the symmetric group and in particular with the Kronecker coefficient. Among these results is the disproof of the only current approach to reducing the algebraic variant of P against NP, a major problem in theoretical information. Greta Panova also applies the theory of symmetric functions as a new method in studying the probabilistic introduction of 2D models in statistical mechanics.

She is a winner of prestigious awards and scholarships for scientific exchange at international institutes. She has been a keynote speaker at a number of international conferences, including the Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC) Conference and other major events in Japan, Germany and the United States.

Members of the International Committee for the award:

Acad. Vesselin Drensky (Sofia, Bulgaria) – Chairman, who replaced the late Acad. Blagovest Sendov after his death;
Prof. Efim Zelmanov (San Diego, USA, Fields Medalist);
Prof. Armen Sergeev (Moscow, Russia);
Prof. Veselin Petkov (Bordeaux, France);
Prof. Lachezar Avramov (Lincoln, Nebraska, USA).

The award will be presented during the International Conference “Mathematics Days in Sofia” in 2021.

Kiril Datchev
Purdue University, USA

Kiril Dachev was born on August 24, 1983. He started his secondary education at the Sofia-based National School of Mathematics and Science “Academician Lyubomir Tchakalov” and graduated in the USA. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree at the Columbia University in 2005, and in 2010 he defended his PhD thesis at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Maciej Zworski, who describes him as “a very strong and creative young mathematician who, alone or in co-authorship, has in-depth and remarkable contributions to the partial differential equations and mathematical physics.”
He received a four-year post-doctorate scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during which he also had shorter post-doctoral courses at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkely and at the University of Paris 13. In 2013 he became an assistant professor of mathematics at Purdue University.
The main results of Kiril Datchev are related to the theory of partial differential equations. He is working successfully in several areas of the PDE theory – semi-classical analysis, geometric scattering, resonance distribution, wavelet decomposition, dispersion equations, inverse tasks. Part of his results were obtained jointly with some well-known specialists such as András Vasy, Jesse Gell-Redman, Maarten de Hoop, Semyon Dyatlov, Maciej Zworski, Tanya Christiansen, Andrew Hassell, Hamid Hezari, Justin Holmer.

Members of the International Committee selecting the award winner:

Acad. Stanimir Troyanski (Sofia, Bulgaria) – Chairman;
Prof. Efim Zelmanov (San Diego, USA, Fields Medalist);
Prof. Armen Sergeyev (Moscow, Russia);
Prof. Lachezar Stoyanov (Perth, Australia);
Prof. Vidar Thomée (Göteborg, Sweden, a foreign member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences).
The prize was awarded on July 10, 2017 during the Second International Conference Mathematics Days in Sofia.
Inaugural Talk: Wave Asymptotics for Manifolds with Cylindrical Ends

Martin Kassabov
Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

Martin Kassabov (born in 1977) defended his diploma thesis at Sofia University in 1998, and in 2003 he defended a PhD thesis at Yale University under the supervision of the Fields medalist Efim Zelmanov. At the age of 33, Martin Kassabov received a one-year position as Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Southampton, UK, and at 34 he became a full professor at Cornell University. He was awarded two very prestigious scholarships: the Centennial Fellowship of the American Mathematical Society for 2007 and the Von Neumann Fellowship of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University for 2009. Martin Kassabov was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, Korea in 2014. His report was presented at a joint session of two sections: the Algebra section and Lie Theory and Generalizations section. He is the second Bulgarian mathematician dignified with such an honor.
The main results of Martin Kassabov are in the combinatorial group theory. He is working successfully in several areas of the theory of finite groups – automorphism towers, topological group completions, finite simple groups, algorithmic properties, growth functions. Part of his results were obtained jointly with the best experts in the field, like Alexander Lubotzky, Aner Shalev, Robert Guralnick, William Cantor, Igor Pak, Mark Sapir.

Members of the International Committee selecting the award winner:

Acad. Vesselin Drensky (Sofia, Bulgaria) – Chairman;
Prof. Lachezar Stoyanov, D.Sc. (Perth, Australia);
Acad. Jonathan Borwein (Newcastle, Australia, a foreign member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences);
Acad. Edward Saff (Vanderbilt, USA, a foreign member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences);
Prof. Vidar Thomée (Göteborg, Sweden, a foreign member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences);
The prize was awarded on April 2, 2015 during the XLIV Spring Conference of the Union of Bulgarian Mathematicians in Kamchia.
Inaugural Talk: Representations of Finite Simple Groups and Applications