Danylo Radchenko, new CNRS Researcher at IHES

IHES is delighted to announce the arrival of Danylo Radchenko as a CNRS Researcher within the Alexander Grothendieck lab.

After studying at the University of Manitoba in Canada and the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in Ukraine, Danylo Radchenko earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Don Zagier. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and ETH Zurich. In 2022, he joined the CNRS as a research fellow at the Paul Painlevé Laboratory at Université de Lille.

His research lies at the intersection of analysis, number theory, and geometry. He is particularly interested in energy minimization problems for point configurations, which model the phenomenon of crystallization, explaining why matter forms periodic structures at low temperatures. A central open problem in this area is the Cohn–Kumar conjecture, which states that the hexagonal lattice minimizes potential energy among all planar point configurations.

More broadly, his work seeks to advance the mathematical understanding of crystallization and to clarify its connections with Fourier analysis.

At IHES, Danylo Radchenko will focus on two main research directions:

• Fourier interpolation formulas, including the emergence of certain interpolation identities and “exotic” Poisson summation formulas from optimization problems.
• Polylogarithms and their functional equations, together with the geometric and combinatorial structures they encode, in close connection with number theory.

Photo credit: Chris Peus / IHES