Hiraku Nakajima receives two Frontier of Science Awards

21 July 2023
Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU)

Hiraku Nakajima, Professor at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), has been awarded two Frontier of Science Awards for papers he had co-authored in two categories: Homological Algebra, K-Theory and Noncommutative Algebra, and Mathematics of String Theory and Condensed Matter, it was announced at the inaugural International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) currently being held in Beijing, China.

The ICBS is an annual conference funded and hosted by the Beijing City government, with the aim to support and promote basic research in the sciences worldwide, particularly mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer and information sciences.

“I am very much honored to receive Frontier of Science Awards for two of my joint papers with Alexander Braverman and Michael Finkelberg. I would like to thank many physicists, in particular Edward Witten and Amihay Hanany, who have explained Coulomb branches to us, mathematicians. We also want to mention the symplectic duality, proposed by Tom Braden, Anthony Licata, Nicholas Proudfoot and Ben Webster. It makes our result one of hot topics in geometric representation theory.

“Quiver is a favorite topic for me over years, while affine Grassmannian is for Misha and Sasha. It was wonderful that two topics are connected in this paper. Results in this paper was explained to me by Witten in lectures at Newton Institute in 1996. I was very happy when I finally understood what he said 18 years later in a mathematically rigorous way,” said Nakajima.

The Frontier of Science Awards commemorates scientific works in 34 areas that have been published in the past 5 years, is of the highest scientific value and originality and has made an important impact on its area, and has been evaluated and accepted by scholars in its area.

The goal of this award is to encourage young scholars to look to the frontiers of basic science, set goals to obtain breakthrough results as early as possible, and contribute wisdom and energy to humankind's study of the mysteries of the natural world.

Frontier of Science Award details
Award category: Homological Algebra, K-Theory and Noncommutative Algebra
Paper title: Coulomb branches of 3d N=4 quiver gauge theories and slices in the affine Grassmannian
Journal: Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics (2019)
Authors: Alexander Braverman (University of Toronto)
Michael Finkelberg (HSE University)
Hiraku Nakajima (IPMU)

Award catergory: Mathematics of String Theory and Condensed Matter
Paper title: Towards a mathematical definition of Coulomb branches of 3-dimensional N = 4 gauge theories, II
Journal: Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics (2018)
Authors: Alexander Braverman (University of Toronto)
Michael Finkelberg (HSE University)
Hiraku Nakajima (The University of Tokyo)

About Hiraku Nakajima
Hiraku Nakajima received his PhD in Science from the University of Tokyo in 1991. He has since held research posts in Mathematics at the University of Tokyo, Tohoku University, and Kyoto University, before joining the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) in 2018 as Principal Investigator. He is currently Professor at Kavli IPMU, and Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University. He was awarded the Asahi Prize in 2016, and has received several awards from mathematical societies in Japan and the USA. In 2023 he became the President of the International Mathematical Union.