Wei Zhang (Chinese: 张伟; born 1981) is a Chinese mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1]

Zhang grew up in Sichuan province and attended Chengdu No.7 High School.^[2] He earned his B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in 2004 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2009 under the supervision of Shou-Wu Zhang.^[3][4]

Zhang was a postdoctoral researcher and Benjamin Peirce Fellow at Harvard University from 2009 to 2011. He was a member of the mathematics faculty at Columbia University from 2011 to 2017, initially as an assistant professor before becoming a full professor in 2015. He has been a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2017.^[4][5]

His collaborations with Zhiwei Yun, Xinyi Yuan and Xinwen Zhu have received attention in publications such as Quanta Magazine and Business Insider.^[6][7] In particular, his work with Zhiwei Yun on the Taylor expansion of L-functions is "already being hailed as one of the most exciting breakthroughs in an important area of number theory in the last 30 years."^[6]

Zhang has also made substantial contributions to the global Gan–Gross–Prasad conjecture.

He was a recipient of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2010, for "far-reaching contributions by himself and in collaboration with others to a broad range of areas in mathematics, including number theory, automorphic forms, L-functions, trace formulas, representation theory, and algebraic geometry.”^[8] In 2013, Zhang received a Sloan Research Fellowship; in 2016 Zhang was awarded the Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics.^[4][9] In December 2017 he was awarded 2018 New Horizons In Mathematics Prize together with Zhiwei Yun, Aaron Naber and Maryna Viazovska. In 2019 he received the Clay Research Award.^[10]

He was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry and geometric representation theory".^[11] He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.^[12]

• "Automorphic period and the central value of Rankin-Selberg L-function", J. Amer. Math. Soc. 27 (2014), 541–612.
• "On arithmetic fundamental lemmas", Invent. Math., 188 (2012), No. 1, 197–252.
• "Fourier transform and the global Gan–Gross–Prasad conjecture for unitary groups", Annals of Mathematics 180 (2014), No. 3, 971–1049.
• "Selmer groups and the indivisibility of Heegner points", Cambridge Journal of Mathematics 2 (2014), no. 2, 191–253.
• (with Michael Rapoport, Ulrich Terstiege) "On the Arithmetic Fundamental Lemma in the minuscule case", Compositio Mathematica 149 (2013), no. 10, 1631–1666.
• (with Xinyi Yuan, Shou-Wu Zhang) "The Gross–Kohnen–Zagier theorem over totally real fields", Compositio Mathematica 145 (2009), no. 5, 1147–1162.
• (with Xinyi Yuan, Shou-Wu Zhang) "The Gross–Zagier formula on Shimura curves", Annals of Mathematics Studies vol. 184, Princeton University Press, 2012.
• (with Manjul Bhargava, Christopher Skinner) "A majority of elliptic curves over Q satisfy the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture", preprint.
• (with Zhiwei Yun) "Shtukas and the Taylor expansion of L-functions", Annals of Mathematics 186 (2017), No. 3, 767–911.
• (with Xinyi Yuan, Shou-Wu Zhang) "Triple product L-series and Gross–Kudla–Schoen cycles", preprint.
• (with Yifeng Liu, Shou-Wu Zhang) "On p-adic Waldspurger formula", preprint.