Heuer will receive the prize for his paper “A p-adic Simpson correspondence for smooth proper rigid varieties”, which was published in the journal Inventiones Mathematicae in 2025. This work in the area of p-adic Hodge theory establishes a deep connection between two quite different mathematical worlds: On the one hand, there are the so-called Higgs bundles, which originate in complex geometry and mathematical physics. On the other hand, there are p-adic local systems, which play a very important role in number theory. A connection between these two worlds, the so-called "p-adic Simpson correspondence", was first established 20 years ago by Gerd Faltings, as well as by Christopher Deninger and Annette Werner, in special cases. But until recently, the general case remained mysterious. In his award-winning article, Heuer achieved a breakthrough: To this end, he employs in new ways methods from perfectoid geometry, which was developed by Peter Scholze in a line of work that earned him the Fields Medal in 2018. Heuer’s research group at LUH is currently investigating the p-adic Simpson correspondence and its applications in number theory and geometry, in collaboration with CRC 326 GAUS and the Research Training Group RTG 2965 “From Geometry to Numbers”.
Prof. Ben Heuer studied mathematics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in 2019 at the London School of Geometry and Number Theory. Following postdoctoral positions in Bonn and Frankfurt, he has been a professor at the Institute of Algebra, Number Theory and Discrete Mathematics at LUH since 2025.
