Henryk Iwaniec

Henryk Iwaniec
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Born	(1947-10-09) October 9, 1947 Elbląg, Poland
Residence	United States
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	Polish Academy of Sciences Institute for Advanced Study Rutgers University
Alma mater	University of Warsaw
Doctoral advisor	Andrzej Schinzel
Known for	analytic number theory Friedlander–Iwaniec theorem automorphic forms Sieve theory
Notable awards	Ostrowski Prize (2001) Cole Prize (2002) Steele Prize (2011) Shaw Prize (2015)

Henryk Iwaniec (born October 9, 1947) is a Polish American mathematician, and since 1987 a professor at Rutgers University.

Background and education

Iwaniec studied at the University of Warsaw, where he got his Ph.D. in 1972 under Andrzej Schinzel. He then held positions at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences until 1983 when he left Poland. He held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Michigan, and University of Colorado at Boulder before being appointed Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is a citizen of both Poland and the United States.

He and mathematician Tadeusz Iwaniec are twin brothers.

Work

Iwaniec studies both sieve methods and deep complex-analytic techniques, with an emphasis on the theory of automorphic forms and harmonic analysis.

In 1997, Iwaniec and John Friedlander proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form $a^2 + b^4$. Results of this strength had previously been seen as completely out of reach: sieve theory—used by Iwaniec and Friedlander in combination with other techniques—cannot usually distinguish between primes and products of two primes, say.

In 2001 Iwaniec was awarded the seventh Ostrowski Prize. The prize citation read, in part, "Iwaniec's work is characterized by depth, profound understanding of the difficulties of a problem, and unsurpassed technique. He has made deep contributions to the field of analytic number theory, mainly in modular forms on GL(2) and sieve methods."

Awards and honors

He was awarded the fourteenth Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory in 2002. He received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2011. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2015 he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Mathematics.

Further reading

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External links

• Henryk Iwaniec at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Henryk Iwaniec's results at the International Mathematical Olympiad