It was announced today that Dr Tom Sanders, Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics, is joint winner of one of the oldest and most prestigious prizes of the University of Cambridge, the Adams Prize.

Professor Arieh Iserles, Chairman of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, said: "The work of both this year's winners has transformed our understanding of important topics in analytic number theory. They have each introduced new methodologies and techniques in applying deep tools from analysis in number theory; their results have already fostered much new research of world's leading mathematicians.

"Tom Sanders employed deep harmonic analysis to understand arithmetic progressions answering long-standing conjectures in number theory."

The Master, Professor Frank Kelly, said: "Previous winners of the Adams Prize include James Clerk Maxwell and William Hodge, and for Tom to win such a prestigious award at such an early stage of his career is an outstanding achievement."

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams, and commemorates Adams’ discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.