Koichi Oyakawa receives Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award
Koichi Oyakawa, a PhD student in the Vanderbilt Mathematics Department, has received the Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award. As stated in the citation, this premier award from the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School celebrates doctoral students who demonstrate truly exceptional research and scholarship.
Koichi is a fourth-year graduate student who has been working under the direction of PhD advisor Denis Osin since 2022. He has proved a number of impressive results at the intersection of geometric group theory, functional analysis, and descriptive set theory. His contributions are outstanding in both breadth and technical depth.
Koichi has five publications, including single-authored papers published or accepted for publication in the Journal of Functional Analysis (one of the top two journals in the field of functional analysis) and Forum Mathematics, Sigma (a highly selective general mathematical journal). Additionally, he co-authored a paper with Osin and Andy Jarnevic published in the Journal of Algebra (the leading journal in algebra). He published another joint paper with his peers – Srivatsav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, Forte Shinko, and Pieter Spaas – accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.
Koichi’s contributions have already been recognized by the international mathematical community. In 2022-2023, he delivered nine talks at seminars and conferences outside of Vanderbilt, including an invited sectional talk at the Canadian Mathematical Society winter meeting in Montreal, an invited presentation at a workshop at Kyoto University, and a plenary talk at a conference at the University of Iowa. Furthermore, Koichi has been invited to give a sectional talk at the Spring Topology and Dynamics Conference in March 2024.