Congratulations to Jerry Wang, professor of Pure Mathematics, who recently won the John Coates Best Paper Award for Number Theory at the 2024 International Consortium of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM). Wang also gave a keynote at the conference, which was held in Shanghai from January 3 to 6, 2025.
Wang co-authored the winning paper, “Squarefree values of polynomial discriminants I,” with Manjul Bhargava and Arul Shankar. It was published in Inventiones Mathematicae in 2022. The authors “proved the long standing conjecture on the number of monic polynomials having squarefree discriminant, and give lower bounds for the number of degree n number fields having discriminant bounded by X.”
“We feel very honoured and humbled to receive this award,” Wang says. “We are very thankful for the selection committee’s effort and time that went into the consideration of our work. We truly appreciate the support and encouragement of our colleagues and loved ones and the hospitality of Princeton University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Waterloo.”
Wang has been a professor at the University of Waterloo since 2017, where he researches analytic number theory. Simply put, “I count things!”
“This was my first time going back to China for a math event,” Wang says. “I was very impressed by how far and organized the Chinese mathematics community has grown. I deeply appreciate the work that Professor Shing-Tung Yau and many other distinguished professors have put into making this possible.”
To learn more about the ICCM, and see a list of other awards presented at the conference, visit their website.