Alexander Petrov Awarded Clay Research Fellowship

2022 doctoral candidate Alexander Petrov has been awarded a prestigious five year Clay Research Fellowship for his work on number theory. Petrov was advised by Mark Kisin.

Clay Research Fellows are selected for their research achievements and their potential to become leaders in research mathematics. All are recent Ph.D.’s, and many are selected as they complete their thesis work.

From the Clay Mathematics Institute announcement:

“Petrov has demonstrated exceptional creativity in proving surprising theorems concerning Galois representations and arithmetic local systems on algebraic varieties. Settling a conjecture of Litt, he proved that geometrically irreducible, arithmetic local systems on varieties over p-adic fields are essentially de Rham. He discovered a deep generalization of Belyi’s famous theorem, showing that any irreducible Galois representation which arises in the cohomology of an algebraic variety over a number field, appears in the space of algebraic functions on the fundamental group of the thrice punctured sphere. And he opened a new range of possibilities with counterexamples to a conjecture of Scholze on Hodge symmetry for rigid analytic varieties.”

Alexander Petrov’s website