Oxford Mathematician Konstantin Ardakov has been awarded the 2020 Adams Prize. The Adams Prize is awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge and St John’s College, Cambridge to UK-based researchers, under the age of 40, doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences. This year’s topic was “Algebra”, and the prize has been awarded jointly to Konstantin and Michael Wemyss (University of Glasgow).
Professor Mihalis Dafermos, Chair of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, said: "Prof Ardakov has made substantial contributions to noncommutative Iwasawa theory, and to the p-adic representation theory of p-adic Lie groups. In a long-term collaboration with Simon Wadsley, he has developed a p-adic analogue of the classical theory of D-modules, of significance both in representation theory and to the local Langlands program.
The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College, Cambridge. It is currently worth approximately £15,000. It commemorates Adams’s role in the discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.