China has secured a major academic coup with the recruitment of mathematics luminary Joshua Zahl, recently celebrated for solving the more than 100-year-old three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture.
Zahl is leaving Canada鈥檚 University of British Columbia (UBC) to take up a full-time position as a chair professor at Nankai University鈥檚 Chern Institute of Mathematics (CIM), according to the Chinese educational institution鈥檚 website.
Zahl and his collaborator Wang Hong from New York University posted their milestone proof in a 127-page preprint paper on the open-access repository arXiv in February, and the feat was immediately hailed by the prominent UCLA mathematician Terence Tao.
Writing on his blog a day after the paper appeared, Tao described the achievement as 鈥渟ome spectacular progress in geometric measure theory鈥, confirming that Zahl and Wang had resolved 鈥渢he three-dimensional case of the infamous Kakeya set conjecture鈥.
Tao, who is also Zahl鈥檚 doctoral mentor, has long been focused on the Kakeya problem. He published his ideas on the conjecture in 2014 on his blog, providing a foundation for Zahl and Wang鈥檚 work.
鈥淚t鈥檚 like perfecting a perpetual-motion machine. It鈥檚 magical; they are getting more out of the output than they put in. Their approach proves the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture,鈥 Tao wrote.
Zahl enrolled at the California Institute of Technology in 2004 and earned his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2013, before conducting his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2016, he joined UBC鈥檚 mathematics department, where he served as an assistant professor and later as an associate professor.
Zahl and Wang have collaborated for many years. Their proof of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture evolved through multiple stages, culminating in three articles they refer to as a trilogy.
The first paper, published in 2022 and titled 鈥淪ticky Kakeya Sets and the Sticky Kakeya Conjecture鈥, proved the absence of sticky counterexamples to the Kakeya conjecture, strongly supporting its validity.
The second article was published online in 2024 and in this year鈥檚 April 29 print edition of the top mathematics journal Inventiones Mathematicae.
Beyond his work on the Kakeya conjecture, Zahl has made significant contributions to several areas of mathematics, including discrete mathematics, Fourier analysis, and geometric measure theory.
He was awarded the 2024 ICBS Frontiers of Science Award in Mathematics and the 2023 PIMS/UBC Mathematical Sciences Early Career Award.
In a meeting with Chen Yulu, president of Nankai University, Zahl highlighted the CIM鈥檚 intense academic atmosphere and excellent research team, describing it as an ideal research platform, according to the website article.
The Nankai CIM is named after its founder, renowned Chinese mathematician S.S. Chern, who established the institute in 1985 and served as its first director. Zahl is its third recent internationally renowned mathematician to be recruited to a full-time position.
Next year, he is scheduled to give a 45-minute presentation at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia, where the Fields Medal 鈥 often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics 鈥 will also be awarded.
Both Zahl and Wang are considered strong contenders for the award, which is presented every four years to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40.
While Wang will be 36, Zahl will be exactly 40 years old.
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