Press release: Growth and expansion in non-commutative groups

Nr. 223/2015 - 05.10.2015

Göttingen Mathematician awarded Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council

(pug) The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Consolidator Grant to Professor Harald Andrés Helfgott, mathematician at Göttingen University. With this grant, the ERC is promoting research into theorems relating to growth and expansion in non-commutative groups. The grant provides for a total of about 1.37 million Euros for the coming five years.

Within the ERC project entitled "Groups, Representations and Analysis in Number Theory" (abbreviated: GRANT), Professor Helfgott and his team are analysing the relations between non-commutative groups and other fields like algorithms, geometric group theory – particularly for sofic groups – as well as analytical number theory. The researchers are especially focusing their interest on additive combinatorics, transformed in terms of group processes, as relevant to cancellation in arithmetically relevant short exponential sums.

Harald Andrés Helfgott was born in Peru in 1977. After his studies at Brandeis University, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2003. After postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and the Université de Montréal, he worked at the University of Bristol. In 2010, he was appointed researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), also working at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Université de Paris VI/VII. Since 2015, he has held the Alexander von Humboldt professorship at Göttingen University. The many honours he has been awarded include the Whitehead Prize (2010), the Adams Prize (2011) and invitations as speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (2014).

With its ERC Consolidator Grants, the European Union aims to strengthen excellent researchers in consolidating their scientific careers. The grants are designed to support them in further solidifying their research teams and pursing innovative ideas.

Contact address:
Professor Harald Andrés Helfgott
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Mathematics Institute
Bunsenstraße 3-5, 37073 Göttingen
Phone +49 (0)551 39-7770
E-mail: hhelfgo@uni-math.gwdg.de
Website: www.uni-goettingen.de/en/266244.html