Peter Clive Sarnak (born 18 December 1953) is a South African-born mathematician with dual South-African and American nationalities. Sarnak has been a member of the permanent faculty of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2007. He is also Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University since 2002, succeeding Andrew Wiles, and is an editor of the Annals of Mathematics. He is known for his work in analytic number theory. He also sits on the Board of Adjudicators and the selection committee for the Mathematics award, given under the auspices of the Shaw Prize. Education Sarnak is the grandson of one of Johannesburg's leading rabbis and lived in Israel for three years as a child. He graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand (BSc 1975, BSc(Hons) 1976) and Stanford University (PhD 1980), under the direction of Paul Cohen. Sarnak's highly cited work (with A. Lubotzky and R. Phillips) applied deep results in number theory to Ramanujan graphs, with connections to combinatorics and computer science. Career and research Sarnak has made major contributions to analysis and number theory. He is widely recognised internationally as one of the leading analytic number theorists of his generation. His early work on the existence of cusp forms led to the disproof of a conjecture of Atle Selberg. He has obtained the strongest known bounds towards the Ramanujan–Petersson conjectures for sparse graphs, and he was one of the first to exploit connections between certain questions of theoretical physics and analytic number theory. There are fundamental contributions to arithmetical quantum chaos, a term which he introduced, and to the relationship between random matrix theory and the zeros of L-functions. His work on subconvexity for Rankin–Selberg L-functions led to the resolution of Hilbert's eleventh problem. During his career he has held numerous appointments including: Assistant Professor, 1980–83; Associate Professor, 1983; Professor, 2001–2005, Courant Institute, New York University Associate Professor, 1984–87; Professor, 1987–91, Stanford University Professor, 1991–; H. Fine Professor, 1995–96; Chairman, Dept of Mathematics, 1996–99; Eugene Higgins Professor, 2002–, Princeton University Member, 1999–2002 and 2005–2007; Faculty, 2007–, Institute for Advanced Study Publications Some Applications of Modular Forms, 1990 (joint editor) Extremal Riemann Surfaces, 1997 (joint author) Random Matrices, Frobenius Eigenvalues and Monodromy, 1998 (joint editor) Selected Works of Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (Collected Works), 2000 (joint author) Elementary Number Theory, Group Theory and Ramanujan Graphs, 2003 (joint editor) Selected Papers Volume I-Peter Lax, 2005 (joint