Frederick Manners has won a prestigious EMS Prize at the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) 2024, currently taking place in Seville, Spain!

Ten of these prizes are awarded by the European Mathematical Society every four years at the ECM to mathematicians under the age of 35 in "recognition of exceptional contributions to mathematics". The winners must be of European nationality or have carried out their work in Europe. Manners is currently Professor at the University of California, San Diego, and did his PhD at the University of Oxford.

Manners is interested in a wide variety of mathematical areas, but the EMS Prize committee made a special mention of a particularly nice result, known as the pyjama problem. Imagine the plane with vertical black stripes drawn at every point that has an x-coordinate that is an integer. The question is, if you rotate this pattern around the point with coordinates (0,0) some (finite) number of times and superimpose the results after each rotation, can you turn the entire plane black?

Manners proved that the answer is "yes". Indeed, this is true no matter how thin the original stripes. Quite amazing!

Manners was awarded the Prize in front of a packed auditorium in Seville's beautiful Teatro de la Maestranza, in an opening ceremony that also featured a music by the renowned flamenco group Dorantes. We're hoping to interview with him for our podcast, so stay tuned!

Congratulations!

This content was produced in a collaboration with the London Mathematical Society.