Ishan Levy and Collaborators Win Clay Research Award

Homotopy theorist Ishan Levy, Member (2025–26) and soon-to-be Visiting Professor (2026–31) in the School of Mathematics, was recognized this April in the Clay Research Awards.

The work for which Levy was honored was conducted alongside three collaborators: Robert Burklund, Tomer Schlank, and another IAS-affiliated mathematician, Jeremy Hahn, Member (2023) in the School. Their “remarkable work” on counterexamples to Ravenel’s Telescope Conjecture—a “milestone achievement,” according to the citation—responded to the last open conjecture from a landmark paper in chromatic homotopy theory.

Proposed in 1984, Ravenel’s Telescope Conjecture explored the fundamental building blocks of complex shapes, predicting that two specific methods for analyzing them—one using infinitely layered "telescoping" patterns and another using a more manageable mathematical shortcut—would always yield the exact same results. While Ravenel's other related predictions were quickly proven true, this specific puzzle remained a stubborn mystery for nearly forty years. Levy and his team disproved the conjecture, finding counterexamples demonstrating that the two analytical methods actually yield distinctly different results.

The Clay Research awards are granted annually by the Clay Mathematics Institute, an organization dedicated to “furthering the beauty, power, and universality of mathematical thought.”

Hong Wang, another Member (2019–21) in the School, received an award this year, too. Wang was recognized for research on geometric problems in harmonic analysis, specifically her work on the Furstenberg set conjecture and the Kakeya conjecture.