Mathematics Professor Nikhil Srivastava receives inaugural Ciprian Foias Prize in Operator Theory

Adam Marcus, Daniel Spielman, and Nikhil Srivastava will receive the 2022 Ciprian Foias Prize in Operator Theory. The award recognizes their highly original work that introduced and developed methods for understanding the characteristic polynomial of matrices, namely the iterative sparsification method (also in collaboration with Batson) and the method of interlacing polynomials.

Together, these ideas provided a powerful toolkit with many applications, notably in the trio's breakthrough paper “Interlacing families II: mixed characteristic polynomials and the Kadison–Singer problem” (Annals of Mathematics, 2015), which solves the famous “paving problem'' in operator theory, formulated by Richard Kadison and Isadore Singer in 1959.