Rate My Professor Jori Merikoski

Jori Merikoski is an assistant professor on the tenure track in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki, where he leads the Number Theory Research Group. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the University of Turku under the supervision of Kaisa Matomäki, with a dissertation titled 'Approximations to Landau's problems on prime numbers,' which received the Finnish Mathematical Society Dissertation Prize in 2021. Prior to his current position, Merikoski held a postdoctoral position from 2021 to 2025 at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, working with James Maynard. He also served as an Academy Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Turku. His academic career has been marked by contributions to analytic number theory, particularly in the distribution of prime numbers.

Merikoski's research interests include prime numbers, sieve methods, and the spectral theory of automorphic forms. He has published numerous papers in prestigious journals, including 'Siegel Zeros, Twin Primes, Goldbach's Conjecture, and Primes in Short Intervals' with Kaisa Matomäki (International Mathematics Research Notices, 2023), 'The polynomials X² + (Y² + 1)² and X² + (Y³ + 1)² represent infinitely many primes' (Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 2023), 'A cubic analogue of the Friedlander–Iwaniec prime theorem' (Mathematische Zeitschrift, 2022), 'Limit points of normalized prime gaps' (Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 2020), 'On the largest square divisor of shifted primes' (Acta Arithmetica, 2020), and 'Large prime factors on short intervals' (Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 2019). Additional works include collaborations such as 'Vector-Valued Local Approximation Spaces' with Tuomas Hytonen (Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications, 2019), 'The divisor function along arithmetic progressions and binary cubic polynomials' with Lasse Grimmelt (2025), and 'On the greatest prime factor and uniform equidistribution of quadratic polynomials' with Lasse Grimmelt (2025). At Helsinki, he teaches advanced courses like Modular Forms and supervises doctoral researchers in number theory. His work advances understanding of prime distributions and related problems in analytic number theory.