Caucher Birkar has been awarded one of this year’s Philip Leverhulme prizes. These prizes are intended for “outstanding scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and where the expectation is that their greatest achievement is yet to come.”
In an earlier post, I said that the abundance conjecture was probably the major open problem in birational geometry. That’s because the obvious major problem in the field, finite generation of the canonical ring, was recently proved by Caucher, with Paulo Cascini, Christopher Hacon and James McKernan (in the paper known as BCHM). Since then he’s been a leader in pushing forward minimal model theory in dimensions 4, 5 and 6.
The other Leverhulme prize winners in mathematics and statistics this year are Tim Browning (Bristol), Tom Coates (Imperial), Radek Erban (Oxford) and Nicolai Meinshausen (Oxford).
Earlier winners are listed: here.
