Xinwen Zhu


Xinwen Zhu is a Chinese mathematician and professor at the California Institute of Technology. His work deals primarily with geometric representation theory and in particular the Langlands program, tying number theory to algebraic geometry and quantum physics.

Biography

Zhu obtained his A.B. in mathematics from Peking University in 2004 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 under the direction of Edward Frenkel. He taught at Harvard University as a Benjamin Peirce Lecturer and at Northwestern University as an assistant professor before joining the Caltech faculty in 2014. According to the American Mathematical Society, " studies the geometry and topology of flag varieties of loop groups and applies techniques from the geometric Langlands program to arithmetic geometry."
The awards Zhu has received include an AMS Centennial Fellowship in 2013 and a Sloan Fellowship in 2015. His research has been published in Annals of Mathematics and Inventiones mathematicae, among other mathematics journals. Zhu, Wei Zhang, Xinyi Yuan and Zhiwei Yun are frequent collaborators. In 2019 he received the Morningside Medal jointly with Zhiwei Yun. Zhu won the 2020 New Horizons in Mathematics Breakthrough Prize "For work in arithmetic algebraic geometry including applications to the theory of Shimura varieties and the Riemann-Hilbert problem for p-adic varieties."

Publications (selected)