Song Sun

Song Sun (孙崩) is a Chinese mathematician and widely regarded Fields Medal contender who left his professorship in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley to join Zhejiang University's Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (IASM) as a permanent faculty member in January 2024. He had held the Berkeley position since 2018, following earlier faculty roles at Stony Brook University from 2013.

Sun was admitted to the Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China in 2002, graduating with a BS in 2006, before moving to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2010 under advisor Xiuxiong Chen. His research centers on differential geometry, complex geometry, and geometric analysis, particularly Kähler geometry and the study of Calabi-Yau metrics.

Sun's honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (2019) — one of the highest honors in geometry — and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics: New Horizons in Mathematics (2021). He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. Announcing his move, Sun said he wanted to "work hard on my research while providing guidance to students who want to pursue maths" and to "pass on my expertise to the younger generation." He joined a wave of top mathematicians recruited to IASM, following Ruan Yongbin (2021) and Liu Yifeng (2021-2022).