UC San Diego Electrical Engineer Receives Popov Prize for Research in Approximation Theory Rahul Parhi received the 2026 Vasil A. Popov Prize in recognition for his distinguished research accomplishments in approximation theory and related areas of mathematics Story by: Published Date Article Content Rahul Parhi, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, has received the 2026 Vasil A. Popov Prize. This prize recognizes distinguished research accomplishments in approximation theory and related areas of mathematics. Parhi’s research centers on applied harmonic analysis, applied functional analysis, and the mathematics of data, with connections to signal processing, machine learning, statistics, and optimization. His current work focuses particularly on the mathematical foundations of neural networks. By studying these models through the lens of function spaces, he investigates their approximation and statistical properties, as well as the implicit and inductive biases introduced during neural network training. At a high level, Parhi seeks to understand the mathematical principles underlying modern artificial intelligence. Neural networks are often described in terms of their architectures and the large collections of parameters learned during training. Parhi instead studies the end-to-end functions represented by these networks. His work examines which functions neural networks can approximate efficiently, how architecture and training procedures favor certain solutions, and when a learned model can be expected to perform well on previously unseen data. Vasil A. Popov Prize The Vasil A. Popov Prize was established in 1995 in memory of Bulgarian mathematician Vasil A. Popov. It is awarded every three years to a mathematician who is removed less than 6 years from their doctoral degree. The Prize recognizes distinguished research accomplishments in approximation theory and related areas of mathematics. Parhi was presented with the award on July 13, 2026 by University