Source: Peoples’Friendship University of Russia –
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Sergey Ivanov, a scholar from St. Petersburg, has been named the first winner of RUDN University’s International Prize for Scientific Achievements in Mathematics, worth 5 million rubles.
The awardee is a Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Professor at St. Petersburg State University, and Principal Researcher at the St. Petersburg Department of the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The award ceremony took place on August 18, during the International Conference on Differential and Functional-Differential Equations (DFDE).
The prize, founded in 2025, will be awarded once every three years. For its very first run, the competition drew 8 applications: 4 from Russian scholars, 1 from an international team of researchers from Russia and Colombia, and 3 more from scientists in Italy, China, and Azerbaijan.
“Each application was sent for review to two external experts – specialists in the relevant field who were not part of the selection committee. Leading scientists from across the globe, including Russia, Germany, France, Portugal, the United States, China, and the Netherlands took part in the evaluation. The experts assessed the scientific significance of the candidates’ work and how it measured up to international standards, scoring each submission on a 10-point scale,” said Alexander Skubachevskii, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics and Scientific Director of RUDN’s S.M. Nikolskii Mathematical Institute.
After the expert reviews, the 14-member selection committee, which included 5 international scholars, took over. Voting was conducted in two secret-ballot rounds. The first allowed members to choose multiple candidates, while in the second, each member could cast a vote for only one contender.
“The jury faced a tough challenge – to objectively compare works from different branches of mathematics, each of great value. After careful deliberation, the committee unanimously agreed, weighing scientific innovation, the influence of the work on the field, and its global relevance. The winning project impressed with its depth and impact, taking the lead by a clear margin,” said Skubachevskii.
The RUDN Prize laureate, Sergey Ivanov, is one of today’s leading geometers. He has solved a number of long-standing problems posed by prominent mathematicians, including the Hopf conjecture on tori without conjugate points, the Busemann problem for 2-dimensional polyhedral surfaces with prescribed face directions, and the Banach problem on 4-dimensional isometric subspaces. Solutions to several of these challenges have paved the way for new and influential mathematical theories.
Professor Ivanov’s research interests extend beyond geometry into the theory of dynamical systems, where he has also made groundbreaking contributions. He solved a major problem in the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) theory concerning dynamics outside KAM tori and was the first to establish an exponential lower bound for the number of collisions in hard-sphere systems. He received the prize for his outstanding work in metric geometry, which has laid the foundations for entirely new areas of mathematics.
“Mathematics is its own world for me, and that is why I love it. It is a place where I can escape the outside world and focus on what I enjoy, on my own terms. I feel genuine satisfaction from the results I achieve. Receiving this award from RUDN University, a top-tier institution with international recognition in many areas including mathematics, is a real honor,” emphasized Sergey Ivanov, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The winner’s submissions for the competition:
- S. Ivanov, D. Mamaev, A. Nordskova, Banach’s isometric subspace problem in dimension four, Inventiones mathematicae, 2023, №233, с.1393–1425 (учитывается ARWU, Scopus TOP-5%).
- D. Burago, S. Ivanov, Boundary rigidity and filling volume minimality of metrics close to a flat one, Annals of Mathematics, 2010, №171, с. 1183–1211 (учитывается ARWU, Scopus TOP-1%).
- D. Burago, S. Ivanov, Examples of exponentially many collisions in a hard ball system, Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems, 2021, №41, с. 2754–2769 (Scopus Q1).
- Ch. Fefferman, S. Ivanov, Ya. Kurylev, M. Lassas, H. Narayanan, Reconstruction and Interpolation of Manifolds. I: The Geometric Whitney Problem, Foundations of Computational Mathematics, 2020, №20, с. 1035–1133 (Scopus TOP-5%).
- D. Burago, S. Ivanov, Riemannian tori without conjugate points are flat, Geometric and Functional Analysis, Vol. 4, No.3 (1994) (Scopus TOP-5%).
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