Thomas O. Höllmann, Chairman of the Foundation's Board of Directors, summarizes: "With Don Zagier, the 2024 Gumin Prize will once again go to a mathematician who has been outstanding in his specialist fields for decades. In addition to number theory and the theory of modular forms, the prizewinner also conducts research in the field of topology. This fact creates a small commonality with the early work of Heinz Gumins, the prize's name-sake. We would like to thank our expert jury, whose careful selection made this award possible."
Don Zagier, born in Heidelberg in 1951, completed his doctorate at the age of 20 in Oxford and habilitated at the University of Bonn. He became Germany's youngest professor in 1976, was a member of the Bonn alma mater's Collaborative Research Center for Theoretical Mathematics and worked at the University of Bonn from 1976 onwards. In the 1980s, he worked on the L-functions of elliptic curves together with Benedict Gross, which led to the solution of Gauss's general class number problem for imaginary quadratic number fields in 1986. From 1995 to 2019, Don Zagier was one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. Among other awards, he received the Cole Prize in 1987 and the Karl-Georg-Christian-von-Staudt Prize in 2001.
The Heinz Gumin Prize for Mathematics of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung is awarded every three to four years to an outstanding mathematician in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. The prize, which was first awarded in 2010, is named after the mathematician and computer scientist Heinz Gumin (1928-2008), who was Chairman of the Board of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung for more than 20 years. At 50,000 euros, the Gumin Prize is the most highly endowed mathematics prize in Germany. Two of the four previous winners are also members of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics: Gerd Faltings in 2010 and Stefan Müller in 2013. Wendelin Werner was honored in 2016 and most recently Wolfgang Hackbusch in 2020.