Song Sun (, born in 1987) is a Chinese mathematician whose research concerns geometry and topology. A

Sloan Research Fellow The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

, he is a professor at the Department of Mathematics of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, where he has been since 2018. In 2019, he was awarded the

Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry __NOTOC__ The Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry is an award granted by the American Mathematical Society for notable research in geometry or topology. It was founded in 1961 in memory of Oswald Veblen. The Veblen Prize is now worth US$5000, and is ...

Biography

Sun attended Huaining High School in

Huaining County Huaining County () is a county in the southwest Anhui Province, People's Republic of China, under the jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Anqing. It has a population of and an area of . The government of Huaining County was originally b ...

Anhui Anhui , (; formerly romanized as Anhwei) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the East China region. Its provincial capital and largest city is Hefei. The province is located across the basins of the Yangtze River ...

, China, before being admitted to the

Special Class for the Gifted Young The Special Class for the Gifted Young is a program aimed to select gifted young students to enter the universities in China. First established in 1978 at the University of Science and Technology of China, it was a major innovation in China's higher ...

at the

University of Science and Technology of China A university () is an educational institution, institution of higher education, higher (or Tertiary education, tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. Universities ty ...

in 2002. After graduating from the program with a B.S. in 2006, he moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

, obtaining his Ph.D in mathematics (

differential geometry Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multili ...

) in 2010. His doctoral advisor was Xiuxiong Chen, and his dissertation was titled "

Kempf–Ness theorem In algebraic geometry, the Kempf–Ness theorem, introduced by , gives a criterion for the stability of a vector in a representation of a complex reductive group. If the complex vector space is given a norm that is invariant under a maximal comp ...

and uniqueness of extremal metrics". Sun worked as a research associate at

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

before becoming an assistant professor at

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

in 2013. He was awarded the

Sloan Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in 2014. In 2018, he was appointed an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics of the

. He was an invited speaker at the 2018

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

, in Rio de Janeiro. For 2021 he received the

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series announced in 2013. It is funded by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg and others. The annual award comes with a cash gift of $3 million. The Breakthrough Prize ...

– New Horizons in Mathematics.Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics 2021
/ref>

Conjecture on Fano manifolds and Veblen Prize

In 2019, Sun was awarded the prestigious

, together with his former advisor Xiuxiong Chen and

Simon Donaldson Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson (born 20 August 1957) is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He i ...

, for proving a long-standing conjecture on Fano manifolds, which states that "a Fano manifold admits a

Kähler–Einstein metric In differential geometry, a Kähler–Einstein metric on a complex manifold is a Riemannian metric that is both a Kähler metric and an Einstein metric. A manifold is said to be Kähler–Einstein if it admits a Kähler–Einstein metric. The ...

if and only if it is K-stable". It had been one of the most actively investigated topics in geometry since a rough version of it was conjectured in the 1980s by

Shing-Tung Yau Shing-Tung Yau (; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau announced retirement from Harvard to become Chair Professor of mathem ...

, who had previously proved the

Calabi conjecture In the mathematical field of differential geometry, the Calabi conjecture was a conjecture about the existence of certain kinds of Riemannian metrics on certain complex manifolds, made by . It was proved by , who received the Fields Medal and Oswa ...

. The conjecture was later given a precise formulation by Donaldson, based in part on earlier work of Gang Tian. The solution by Chen, Donaldson and Sun was published in the ''

Journal of the American Mathematical Society The ''Journal of the American Mathematical Society'' (''JAMS''), is a quarterly peer-reviewed mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in January 1988. Abstracting and indexing This journal is abstr ...

'' in 2015 as a three-article series, "Kähler–Einstein metrics on Fano manifolds, I, II and III".

Major publications

* * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sun, Song Living people 21st-century Chinese mathematicians Differential geometers University of California, Berkeley faculty University of Science and Technology of China alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni Academics of Imperial College London Stony Brook University faculty Mathematicians from Anhui People from Huaining County Year of birth missing (living people) Sloan Research Fellows