From the official press release:

“The 2021 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize is awarded to Dr. Will Sawin of Columbia University for his many path-breaking contributions at the interface of number theory and algebraic geometry utilizing a variety of powerful methods from different areas of mathematics. The prize recognizes his revolutionary recent joint work with Mark Shusterman which establishes analogues of the celebrated prime twins and Goldbach conjectures in the function field context, and the proof in a function field setting of the analogue of Chowla’s conjecture on the correlations of the Moebius function, and Landau’s conjecture that there are infinitely many primes of the form N2 + 1. In addition, the prize recognizes his joint paper with Emmanuel Kowalski and Philippe Michel (Annals of Mathematics (2017)) on bilinear forms with Kloosterman sums, where a long standing problem on moments of L-functions is solved by combining techniques from automorphic forms, analytic number theory, and p-adic cohomology. The prize is also for his fundamental joint work with Tim Browning on a geometric version of the Hardy-Littlewood-Ramanujan circle method (Annals of Mathematics (2020)), which has vastly increased our understanding of spaces of rational curves of a given degree on a smooth hyspersurface, and also enabled us to perform enumerative geometry on such surfaces in situations that were beyond the reach of traditional geometric methods. Finally, the prize notes the impact of his work in the resolution of the mixing conjecture of Philippe Michel and Akshay Venkatesh in the function field setting, and in particular his paper in Inventiones Mathematicae (2020), where he settled the conjecture in positive characteristic. These and other contributions of Dr. Sawin are having far-reaching consequences in various branches of mathematics.”

Additional details on the prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SASTRA_Ramanujan_Prize

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