“The Ostrowski Prize for 2021 is awarded to Tim Austin for his outstanding work in a remarkably broad array of fields, including probability theory, ergodic theory and dynamics, combinatorics, operator algebras, group cohomology, and metric geometry. He made several breakthroughs, solving old standing problems, while at the same time making deep theory-building contributions.
The main justification for this award is Tim Austin’s recent groundbreaking solution of the weak Pinsker conjecture in ergodic theory. Ever since the 1970s, when this conjecture was formulated by Thouvenot, it has been recognized as the most important open problem in Bernoulli isomorphism theory. Austin’s result, solving the problem in the affirmative, states that an arbitrary ergodic measure preserving transformation decomposes as a direct product of a Bernoulli shift and a low-entropy transformation.”
The Ostrowski Foundation was created by Alexander M. Ostrowski, professor at the University of Basel from 1928 until his retirement in 1958. Since 1989, the foundation has awarded a prize every other year to a mathematician with recent outstanding achievements in pure mathematics and in the foundations of numerical mathematics.
To read more, visit the Ostrowski Foundation website here.
Visit Tim Austin’s webpage here.
