Among the recipients were Nikhil Srivastava and Meenakshi Wadhwa.
Srivastava, of U.C. Berkeley, as well as Adam Marcus and Daniel Alan Spielman of Yale, were named recipients of the Michael and Sheila Held Prize.
Marcus, Spielman and Srivastava solved longstanding questions on the Kadison-Singer problem and on Ramanujan graphs, and in the process uncovered a deep new connection between linear algebra, geometry of polynomials, and graph theory that has inspired the next generation of theoretical computer scientists, according to the NAS.Â
Their groundbreaking papers on these questions, both published in 2015, solved problems that mathematicians had been working on for several decades. In particular, their solution to the Kadison-Singer problem, first posited in 1959, has been hailed as one of the most important developments in mathematics of the past decade, it said.