Cristian Dumitru Popescu

The son of historian Dumitru Micu Popescu and biologist Rodica Jerișteanu, Popescu was born in 1964 in Novaci, Gorj County. After completing his undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Bucharest, He became a professor at Johns Hopkins University, after which he moved to his current position as a professor at the University of California, San Diego. ==Research contributions==

Popescu formulated and proved function field versions of the Gras conjectures and Rubin's integral refinement of the abelian Stark conjectures. He has also made important contributions to the Stark conjectures over number fields, formulating an alternative to Rubin's refinement, known as Popescu's conjecture. Although slightly weaker than Rubin's conjecture, it has the advantage that it can presently be shown to remain true under raising the base field or lowering the top field of the extension. Popescu and Cornelius Greither formulated equivariant versions of Iwasawa's main conjecture over function fields and number fields, proving unconditionally the function field version and conditionally the number field version. These conjectures have important implications for the Brumer–Stark conjecture, the Coates-Sinnott conjecture and Gross' conjecture on special values of L-functions. ==Recognition==

Popescu was awarded the Simion Stoilow Prize by the Romanian Academy in 2002. In 2015-2016, he was a Simons Fellow at Harvard University. He was elected to the 2021 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to number theory and arithmetic geometry". He is an honorary member of the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. ==References==