With the Award for Excellence in Mathematics for 2020, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of BAS (IMI) honors Greta Panova, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. The award will be presented during the international conference “Mathematics Days of in Sofia” in 2021.

The winner of the award is determined by an international jury of prominent world experts in the field of mathematics. The IMI Mathematics Prize is awarded to Bulgarian citizens up to the age of 40. For the first time, the winner is a woman. So far, the award has been presented in 2014 and 2017 at the conference “Mathematics Days in Sofia” (MDS). The third edition of the forum was supposed to take place this year but the organizers are postponing it until 2021.

Greta Panova graduated from the National High School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics “Academician Lyubomir Chakalov”. In 2005, she received a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in 2006 she earned a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2011, she defended her doctoral dissertation at Harvard under the direction of Richard Stanley.

Greta Panova won the Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles for the period 2011-2014 and in the meantime was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley (MSRI), and in 2014-2018 she was a senior assistant and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Southern California.

Greta Panova works in the field of algebraic combinatorics and its applications in the computational complexity theory, probability and statistical mechanics. She is the author of about 40 articles, including publications in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Advances in Mathematics, Annals of Probability. Much of her work is related to representation-theoretic multiplicities and in particular to Kronecker coefficients. Among these results is disproving some of the main conjectures in the approach to proving the algebraic version of P vs NP, the main problem in theoretical informatics. Greta Panova has also applied the theory of symmetric functions as a new method in studying the probabilistic behavior of dimer models in statistical mechanics.

See more at:  https://math.bas.bg/