DATE2024.04.23 #Awards & Prizes

Associate Professor Kohei Iwaki received the 2024 Young Scientist Award from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

Associate Professor Kohei Iwaki

We are pleased to announce that Associate Professor Kohei Iwaki has received the Young Scientist Award from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. We would like to extend our congratulations to him. The awarded subject is "Study of Painlevé Equations by Exact WKB Analysis and Topological Recurison".

The Painlevé equations are a second-order nonlinear ordinary differential equations that were discovered in the process of searching for new special functions following the elliptic functions and hypergeometric functions that were central to many mathematical theories in the 19th century. The study of this equation using exact WKB analysis has yielded many results, including analytic continuation of the solution; WKB analysis is a type of singular perturbation that allows detailed calculations by expanding the solution in terms of parameters.

The topological recursion is a framework that generalizes the equation satisfied by the correlation function of the matrix model, and has attracted attention from the viewpoints of mathematics and physics, as various geometrical invariants appear. Associate Professor Iwaki succeeded in providing a new method of construction for the general solution of the Painlevé equation by combining the theory of topological recursion with the theory of WKB analysis. It is expected that different research fields will reveal unknown relationships.

Associate Professor Iwaki has achieved many remarkable results in his research on exact WKB analysis and the Painlevé equation, including a study of the parametric Stokes phenomenon in the Painlevé equation. In addition, his work in clarifying the relationship between exact WKB analysis and cluster algebras is also very important. The world looks forward to Associate Professor continued success.

The Young Scientists' Award of the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology 2024
https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20240409-mxt_sinkou02-000035075_2.pdf

(Responsibility: Associate Professor Hidetaka Sakai, Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences)