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Kevin Hartnett, senior writer at Quanta Magazine covering mathematics and computer science says, At 21, Ashwin Sah has produced a body of work that senior mathematicians say is nearly unprecedented for a college student.
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| Ashwin Sah, 21, compiled a nearly unparalleled body of math research as an undergraduate at MIT. Photo: Celeste Noche for Quanta Magazine |
On May 19, Ashwin Sah posted the best result ever on one of the most important questions in combinatorics. It was a moment that might have called for a celebratory drink, only Sah wasn’t old enough to order one.
The proof joined a long list of mathematical results that Sah, who turned 21 in November, published while an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (he posted this new proof just after graduating). It’s a rare display of precocity even in a field that celebrates youthful genius.
“He has done enough work as an undergraduate to get a faculty position,” said David Conlon of the California Institute of Technology.
The May proof focused on an important feature of combinatorics called Ramsey numbers, which quantify how big a graph (a collection of dots, or vertices, connected by edges) can get before it necessarily contains a certain kind of substructure...
Over the past three years Sah and Sawhney have written dozens of papers, many of them together. This fall they were announced as winners of the 2021 Morgan Prize, jointly given out each year by leading math organizations to recognize the best research by undergraduate mathematicians. Zhao remarked that there is no recent precedent for what they have accomplished.
“There is a long tradition of undergraduate research, but nothing quite at the level of Ashwin and Mehtaab in quantity and quality,” he said.
Source: Quanta Magazine
