MEDIA RELEASE — June 14, 2017

---

Canadian Mathematical Society

OTTAWA – The Canadian Mathematical Society is pleased to announce that Dr. Konstantin Tikhomirov has been named the recipient of the 2017 CMS Doctoral Prize. Tikhomirov will receive the award and present a prize lecture during the CMS Winter Meeting in Waterloo, Ontario, December 2017.

Tikhomirov has made outstanding contributions to several open problems in probability theory, convex geometry, functional analysis, and random matrix theory. He currently holds an Instructor position at Princeton University and has been offered a prestigious Viterbi Postdoctoral fellowship at Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California for the Fall 2017 semester program on Geometric Functional Analysis and Applications.

In his doctoral studies, Tikhomirov investigates on a series of open problems in diverse areas of mathematics. He has written at least ten papers related to Asymptotic Geometric Analysis, Random Matrices, Probability Theory, and Convex Geometry. In particular, he worked on the problem of estimating the distance between an n-dimensional polytope with a fixed number of vertices and the Euclidian ball. In this case he solved the exact dependence between the dimension and the number of vertices.

Tikhomirov also considered problems like understanding better the limit of the smallest singular value of some families of random matrices, as well as when the convex hull of a random walk includes the origin. The impact of his work will have many ramifications for its innovation and its ability to be applied in other situations.

Tikhomirov received his Degree in Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies from Samara State University, Russia in 2008, and was a Candidate of Sciences at Samara State University in 2011. Tikhomirov received his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 2016, his co-supervisors were Professor Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann and Professor Vlad Yaskin.

Tikhomirov has received the Faculty of Science Doctoral Dissertation Award (2016), the Dean's Excellence Award (2015), and the A. Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize (2015) among several other awards and scholarships from the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Science.

About the Doctoral Prize

The Doctoral Prize recognizes outstanding performance by a doctoral student. The prize is awarded to one or two recipients of a Ph.D. from a Canadian university whose overall performance in graduate school is judged to be the most outstanding. Although the dissertation will be the most important criterion (the impact of the results, the creativity of the work, the quality of exposition, etc.) it will not be the only one. Other publications, activities in support of students and other accomplishments will also be considered.

For information about past recipients visit: https://cms.math.ca/Prizes/info/dp.html