PARK Jihun, group leader at the Center of Geometry and Physics (Professor at the Department of Mathematics, POSTECH) has won the Korean Mathematical Society's 2017 Best Paper Award. His study entitled "Birationally Rigid Fano Threefold Hypersurfaces" proves a problem that every quasi-smooth weighted Fano threefold hypersurface in the 95 families of Fletcher and Reid is birationally rigid.

▲ PARK Jihun, IBS Group Leader at the Center of Geometry and Physics(Left)
(@POSTECH)

The statement was conjectured in the 1990's and this study is expected to help address many of the Fano varieties' issues, which have been left unsolved. Park, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh over the past four years, verified the 95 families of weighted Fano threefold conjecture that Corti, Pukhlikov, and Reid have developed. Park says, "Our analysis is very creative and accurate to prove the conjecture. I am pleased that this study has illustrated a number of issues regarding Fano varieties that have baffled mathematicians for the past 10 years."

After earning his master's degree in 1996 from Seoul National University, Park earned a PhD in mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University in 2001. He continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Georgia before becoming a professor of the Department of Mathematics, POSTECH in 2003. He joined the IBS Center in 2012 as a group leader and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of the Korean Mathematical Society since 2015.