Manjul Bhargava | |
|---|---|
 Manjul Bhargava in 2014 | |
| Born | (1974-08-08)8 August 1974 (age 51) Hamilton, Ontario, Canada |
| Education | Harvard University (AB) Princeton University (PhD) |
| Known for | Bhargava factorial Bhargava cube 15 and 290 theorems average rank of elliptic curves |
| Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society (2019) Padma Bhushan (2015) Fields Medal (2014) Infosys Prize (2012) Fermat Prize (2011) Cole Prize (2008) Clay Research Award (2005) SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2005) Blumenthal Award (2005) Merten M. Hasse Prize (2003) Morgan Prize (1996) Hoopes Prize (1996) Hertz Fellowship (1996) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Princeton University Leiden University University of Hyderabad |
| Thesis | Higher composition laws (2001) |
| Doctoral advisor | Andrew Wiles[1] |
| Doctoral students | |
| Website | www |
Manjul BhargavaFRS (born 8 August 1974)[2] is aCanadian-American mathematician. He is the Brandon Fradd, Class of 1983, Professor of Mathematics atPrinceton University, the Stieltjes Professor of Number Theory[3] atLeiden University, and also holds Adjunct Professorships at theTata Institute of Fundamental Research, theIndian Institute of Technology Bombay, and theUniversity of Hyderabad. He is known primarily for his contributions tonumber theory.
Bhargava was awarded theFields Medal in 2014. According to theInternational Mathematical Union citation, he was awarded the prize "for developing powerful new methods in thegeometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves".[4][5][6] He was also a member of thePadma Award committee in 2023.[7]
Bhargava was born to anIndian family inHamilton, Ontario, Canada, but grew up and attended school primarily onLong Island,New York. His mother Mira Bhargava, a mathematician atHofstra University, was his first mathematics teacher.[8][9] He completed all of his high school math andcomputer science courses by age 14.[10] He attendedPlainedge High School inNorth Massapequa, and graduated in 1992 as the classvaledictorian. He obtained his AB fromHarvard University in 1996, where he was elected toPhi Beta Kappa. For his research as an undergraduate, he was awarded the 1996Morgan Prize. Bhargava went on to pursue graduate studies at Princeton University, where he completed a doctoral dissertation titled "Higher composition laws" under the supervision ofAndrew Wiles and received his PhD in 2001, with the support of aHertz Fellowship.[11] He was a visiting scholar at theInstitute for Advanced Study in 2001–02,[12] and at Harvard University in 2002–03. Princeton appointed him as a tenured Full Professor in 2003. He was appointed to the Stieltjes Chair inLeiden University in 2010.
Bhargava has also studied thetabla under gurus such asZakir Hussain.[13] He also studiedSanskrit from his grandfather Purushottam Lal Bhargava, a scholar of Sanskrit and ancient Indian history.[14][15] He is an admirer of Sanskrit poetry.[16]
Bhargava’s PhD thesis generalizedGauss's classical law for composition ofbinary quadratic forms to many other situations. One major use of his results is the parametrization of quartic and quintic orders innumber fields, thus allowing the study of the asymptotic behavior of the arithmetic properties of these orders and fields.
His research also includes fundamental contributions to therepresentation theory ofquadratic forms, tointerpolation problems andp-adic analysis, to the study ofideal class groups ofalgebraic number fields, and to the arithmetic theory ofelliptic curves.[17] A short list of his specific mathematical contributions are:
In 2015, Manjul Bhargava and Arul Shankar proved theBirch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for a positive proportion of elliptic curves.[20]
Bhargava has won several awards for his research, the most prestigious being theFields Medal, the highest award in the field of mathematics, which he won in 2014.
He received theMorgan Prize in 1996.[21] andHertz Fellowship[22] He was named one ofPopular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" in November 2002. He then received aClay 5-year Research Fellowship and the Merten M. Hasse Prize from theMAA in 2003,[23] theClay Research Award, theSASTRA Ramanujan Prize, and the Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics in 2005.
Peter Sarnak ofPrinceton University has said of Bhargava:[24]
At mathematics he's at the very top end. For a guy so young I can't remember anybody so decorated at his age. He certainly started out with a bang and has not let it get to his head, which is unusual. Of course he couldn't do what he does if he wasn't brilliant. It's his exceptional talent that's so striking.
In 2008, Bhargava was awarded theAmerican Mathematical Society'sCole Prize.[25] The citation reads:
Bhargava's original and surprising contribution is the discovery of laws of composition on forms of higher degree. His techniques and insights into this question are dazzling; even in the case considered by Gauss, they lead to a new and clearer presentation of that theory.
In 2009, he was awarded the Face of the Future award at the India Abroad Person of the Year ceremony in New York City.[26] In 2014, the same publication gave the India Abroad Publisher's Prize for Special Excellence.[27]
In 2011, he was awarded theFermat Prize for "various generalizations of the Davenport-Heilbronn estimates and for his startling recent results (with Arul Shankar) on the average rank of elliptic curves".[28] In 2012, Bhargava was named an inaugural recipient of the Simons Investigator Award,[29] and became a fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society in its inaugural class of fellows.[30] He was awarded the 2012Infosys Prize in mathematics for his "extraordinarily original work inalgebraic number theory, which has revolutionized the way in whichnumber fields andelliptic curves are counted".[31]
In 2013, he was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences.[32]
In 2014, Bhargava was awarded theFields Medal at theInternational Congress of Mathematicians inSeoul[15] for "developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves".[33]
In 2015, he was awarded thePadma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award of India.[34]
In 2017, Bhargava was elected as a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[35] In 2018, Bhargava was named as the inaugural occupant of The Distinguished Chair for the Public Dissemination of Mathematics at TheNational Museum of Mathematics (MoMath). This is the first visiting professorship in the United States dedicated exclusively to raising public awareness of mathematics.[36] Bhargava was conferred a Fellowship at the Royal Society in 2019.[37]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
