Karim Adiprasito, professor of Mathematics
The Dean has appointed Karim Adiprasito as Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Mathematical Science from 1 September 2019.
Karim Adiprasito was born in 1988 in Aachen, Germany, and is of German and Indonesian descent. He did his undergraduate studies at TU Dortmund, receiving a Diploma in Mathematics with Tudor Zamfirescu, on the way spending a year at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
In 2013 he graduated from the Free University in Berlin with a PhD thesis entitled "Methods from Differential Geometry in Polytope Theory", written under the supervision of Günter Ziegler. It was awarded the Ernst Reuter Prize of the Free University.
After being an EPDI fellow at Institute des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Paris, a Minerva fellow at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University in 2015 (tenured 2016).
Karim’s work has earned him a multitude of prizes. He was awarded the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2015 for “his wide-ranging and deep contributions to discrete geometry using analytic methods, particularly for his solution of old problems of Perles and Shephard on projectively unique polyhedra", as well as the Klachky prize of the Hebrew University in 2017. He also holds a 2016 ERC starting grant and a grant from the Israel Science Foundation.
Most recently, in November last year, he was awarded the prestigious New Horizons Prize in Mathematics for the development, with June Huh and Eric Katz, of combinatorial Hodge theory leading to the resolution of the log-concavity conjecture of Heron-Rota-Welsh.
His research is based in combinatorics, but combines methods from algebra, geometry and topology in new ways, solving problems in a range of areas. When receiving the New Horizons Prize, he said: “Science feels most interesting to me in those moments when it betrays me, when it reveals a hidden path in a place I thought I knew so well, leading away to new places and people, forging new connections, exchanging ideas, until something new is created”.
In Copenhagen, his research will open up new areas in combinatorics, as well as strengthen the department's research profile within algebra, geometry, and topology.
You can meet Karim in office 04.4.15.