Peter Sarnak

Peter Sarnak has made major contributions to number theory and to questions in analysis motivated by number theory. His interest in mathematics is wide-ranging, and his research focuses on the theory of zeta functions and automorphic forms with applications to number theory, combinatorics, and mathematical physics. Sarnak is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, as well as a Professor at the School of Mathematics of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Sarnak was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and graduated with his B.Sc. (Honors) degree in mathematics in 1976. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1980 from Stanford, under the direction of Paul Cohen.

Sarnak was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2002. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2010. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Chicago in 2015. The University of the Witwatersrand conferred an honorary doctorate on Professor Sarnak in July 2014 for his distinguished contributions to the field of mathematics. He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

Among many academic honors, Sarnak was awarded the Polya Prize from SIAM in 1998, the Ostrowski Prize in 2001, the Levi L. Conant Prize in 2003, the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory in 2005, and a Lester R. Ford Award in 2012. He is the recipient of the 2014 Wolf Prize in Mathematics.