Diploma Award to Dustin Clausen

The Hartmann Diploma Prize, which is worth DKK 150,000, is awarded to a younger person who within Danish society is expected to make a valuable contribution - after having shown promising results of general societal value in social, humanitarian, scientific or cultural areas.

"I am very grateful for the award and the recognition the foundation expresses," says Dustin Clausen.

"I warmly congratulate Dustin on the well-deserved award, which he has received for his groundbreaking research programme. The department and the Danish mathematics community are very fortunate that Dustin has chosen to settle in Copenhagen", says Professor Michael Sørensen, Head of Department at the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

Condensed Mathematics

"Dustin Clausen is developing into one of the leading mathematicians of his generation", writes the Hartmann Foundation in the motivation, where Dustin's research is presented as follows:

“Dustin Clausen works to develop and understand the deep connection between geometry and number theory, two basic fields in mathematics. He has developed a far-reaching research program with a view to constructing these geometric structures”.

Dustin Clausen is working with Peter Scholze (Max Planck Institut für Mathematik, Bonn) on a new theory called "Condensed mathematics". Condensed mathematics aims to unite a number of previous theories, for example, algebraic geometry and functional analysis, into one unified theory.

Basically, condensed mathematics is based on a rethinking of topology, or the way points in a set can be connected. Although the new theory has not yet been officially released, it has received some attention from mathematicians around the world, and it has already been used to solve old problems in several different mathematical fields.

Dustin Clausen has won several awards and research grants: David Mumford Prize (Harvard 2008), Hoopes Prize (Harvard 2008), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (M.I.T. 2008-11).

Danish roots

Dustin Clausen, whose Danish grandfather emigrated to Canada, went to Billings Senior High School, Billings (MT) USA in 2003. He received his BSc degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 2008, and his PhD degree in mathematics from M.I.T. in 2013. After graduating, he accepted a five-year position as a postdoc in mathematics at the University of Copenhagen.

During this period, he met his Danish partner, Ida Emilie Hansen, with whom he now has two children, Ingo and Asta. The family moved in 2018 to Germany, where Dustin Clausen worked as a postdoc at the University of Bonn, and later at Max Planck Institut für Mathematik in Bonn. In 2020, the family returned to Denmark, when Dustin Clausen received his current lectureship in mathematics at the University of Copenhagen.

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