URBANA—The Department of Mathematics at Illinois has named two recipients for the 2023 Bateman Prize in Number Theory: Robert Dicks and Maria Siskaki. The Bateman Prize is awarded to a graduate students in recognition of outstanding research in number theory. The prize was initiated in 1999 by the department’s number theory group, who chooses recipients for the award each year.

Maria Siskaki is a sixth-year graduate student, writing her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Florin Boca. Her main research contributions, on the interface between number theory and Ergodic theory, are concerned with the distribution of reduced quadratic irrational numbers for various types of continued fractions, the pair correlation of Farey fractions under congruence constraints, and the analogue of the Gauss problem for nearest integer continued fractions. Siskaki has written four papers on these topics, solo or in collaboration with her advisor. The first three were published in the journals Nonlinearity, Indagationes Mathematicae and Acta Arithmetica.

Robert Dicks is a PhD candidate working on his dissertation with advisor Scott Ahlgren. He works with modular forms, often studying congruence properties for integral and half-integral weight modular forms. He is also interested in related topics, such as Galois representations and elliptic curves. Dicks has published work in the International Journal of Number Theory, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, the Journal of Number Theory, and the Ramanujan Journal.

Shelby Koehne
2-14-23