Sarah Zerbes facts for kids

Sarah Livia Zerbes, born on August 2, 1978, is a German mathematician. She is a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. She specializes in a field of math called algebraic number theory. This area of math studies numbers and their properties using tools from algebra.

Her work helps us understand complex math problems. For example, she has made progress on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. This is a big problem in math that tries to predict things about special shapes called elliptic curves.

Education and Career

Sarah Zerbes studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England. She earned top honors in 2001. She then continued her studies at Cambridge and received her Ph.D. in 2005. Her Ph.D. research was about complex math topics.

After her Ph.D., she worked as a researcher in different places. She was a Marie Curie Fellow in Paris, France. She also did research at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris. Later, she worked at Imperial College London.

In 2008, she became a lecturer at the University of Exeter. A lecturer is like a university teacher. In 2012, she moved to University College London as a lecturer. She became a professor there in 2016. She worked at University College London until 2021. Since January 1, 2022, she has been a full professor of Mathematics at ETH Zurich.

Awards and Recognition

Sarah Zerbes has received several important awards for her math work.

In 2014, she won a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She shared this award with her husband, David Loeffler. He is also a mathematician.

In 2015, Sarah Zerbes and David Loeffler won the Whitehead Prize. They received this award for their work in number theory. They discovered a new "Euler system." This is a special tool that helps solve problems in number theory. Their work helped to expand our understanding of the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.