| Wei Zhang | |
| Alma Mater: | Columbia University Peking University |
| Thesis Title: | Modularity of Generating Functions of Special Cycles on Shimura Varieties |
| Thesis Url: | http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/theses/2009/zhang.pdf |
| Thesis Year: | 2009 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Shou-Wu Zhang |
| Field: | Mathematics |
| Work Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyColumbia University |
Wei Zhang (; born 1981) is a Chinese mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1]
Zhang grew up in Sichuan province and attended Chengdu No.7 High School. [2] He earned his B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in 2004 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2009 under the supervision of Shou-Wu Zhang.[3]
Zhang was a postdoctoral researcher and Benjamin Peirce Fellow at Harvard University from 2009 to 2011. He was a member of the mathematics faculty at Columbia University from 2011 to 2017, initially as an assistant professor before becoming a full professor in 2015. He has been a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2017.[4]
His collaborations with Zhiwei Yun, Xinyi Yuan and Xinwen Zhu have received attention in publications such as Quanta Magazine and Business Insider.[5] [6] In particular, his work with Zhiwei Yun on the Taylor expansion of L-functions is "already being hailed as one of the most exciting breakthroughs in an important area of number theory in the last 30 years."[5]
Zhang has also made substantial contributions to the global Gan–Gross–Prasad conjecture.
He was a recipient of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2010, for "far-reaching contributions by himself and in collaboration with others to a broad range of areas in mathematics, including number theory, automorphic forms, L-functions, trace formulas, representation theory, and algebraic geometry.”[7] In 2013, Zhang received a Sloan Research Fellowship; in 2016 Zhang was awarded the Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics.[8] [9] In December 2017 he was awarded 2018 New Horizons In Mathematics Prize together with Zhiwei Yun, Aaron Naber and Maryna Viazovska. In 2019 he received the Clay Research Award.[10]
He was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry and geometric representation theory". He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.