Assistant Professor Benjamin Rossman, jointly appointed to the departments of mathematics and computer science, is named this year's recipient of the André Aisenstadt Prize in Mathematics.

From the Centre de recherches mathématique website:

The Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM) solicits nominations for the André Aisenstadt Mathematics Prize awarded to recognize talented young Canadian mathematicians. The André Aisenstadt Mathematics Prize, which recognizes outstanding research achievement by a young Canadian mathematician in pure or applied mathematics, consists of a cash award and medal.

Ben Rossman received his PhD in 2010 at MIT under Madhu Sudan, and held postdocs at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley, and the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo before joining the University of Toronto in 2016. He is a Sloan Fellow (2017) and an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro (2018).

Rossman works in computational complexity theory, a branch of theoretical computer science that classifies problems according to their relative difficulty. His research seeks to quantify the minimum resources required to solve basic problems in combinatorial models such as Boolean circuits. Through creative techniques based in logic and the probabilistic method, Ben has derived groundbreaking lower bounds on the complexity of detecting cliques and determining connectivity in random graphs. His other notable results include size and depth hierarchy theorems for bounded-depth circuits, answering longstanding questions. This work has contributed to a reemergence of interest in circuit complexity, a concrete approach to P vs NP which had seen little progress since breakthroughs of the 1980’s. In fall 2018, Ben will be coorganizing a special semester on this topic at the Simons Institute.

Congratulations!