Noam Elkies | |
|---|---|
 Noam Elkies in 2007 | |
| Born | (1966-08-25)August 25, 1966 (age 59) New York City, US |
| Alma mater | Columbia University (BS) Harvard University (PhD) |
| Awards | Putnam Fellow Lester R. Ford Award (2004) Levi L. Conant Prize (2004) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Thesis | Supersingular primes of a given elliptic curve over a number field (1987) |
| Doctoral advisor | Benedict Gross Barry Mazur |
| Doctoral students | Henry Cohn[1] |
Noam David Elkies (born August 25, 1966) is a professor of mathematics atHarvard University. At age 26, he became the youngest professor to receivetenure at Harvard. He is also a pianist,[2]chess national master, andchess composer.
Elkies was born to an engineer father and a piano teacher mother.[3] He attendedStuyvesant High School inNew York City for three years[4] before graduating in 1982 at age 15.[5][6] Achild prodigy, in 1981, at age 14, Elkies was awarded a gold medal at the 22ndInternational Mathematical Olympiad, receiving a perfect score of 42,[7] one of theyoungest to ever do so. He went on toColumbia University, where he won thePutnam competition at age 16 and four months, making him one of the youngestPutnam Fellows in history.[8] Elkies was a Putnam Fellow twice more during his undergraduate years.[9] He graduated valedictorian of his class in 1985.[10] He then earned his PhD in 1987 under the supervision ofBenedict Gross andBarry Mazur atHarvard University.[11]
From 1987 to 1990, Elkies was a junior fellow of theHarvard Society of Fellows.[12]
In 1987, Elkies proved that anelliptic curve over the rational numbers issupersingular at infinitely many primes. In 1988, he found a counterexample toEuler's sum of powers conjecture for fourth powers.[13] His work on these and other problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990.[5] In 1993, Elkies was made a full, tenured professor at age 26. This made him the youngest full professor in Harvard's history.[14] He andA. O. L. Atkin extendedSchoof's algorithm to create theSchoof–Elkies–Atkin algorithm.
Elkies also studies the connections betweenmusic and mathematics; he is on the advisory board of theJournal of Mathematics and Music.[15] He has discovered many new patterns inConway's Game of Life[16] and has studied the mathematics ofstill life patterns in that cellular automaton rule.[17] Elkies is an associate of Harvard'sLowell House.[18]
Elkies is one of the principal investigators of the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, a large multi-university collaboration involvingBoston University,Brown,Dartmouth, Harvard, andMIT.[19]
Elkies is the discoverer (or joint-discoverer) of many current and past record-holdingelliptic curves, including the curve with the highest-known lower bound (≥28) on itsrank, and the curve with the highest-known exact rank (=20).[20][21] In August 2024, he posted to a number theory listserv that he and Zev Klagsbrun had found an elliptic curve of rank at least 29 by methods similar to those used to find the rank 28 example.[22]
Elkies is abass-baritone and formerly played the piano for theHarvard Glee Club. Jameson N. Marvin, former director of the Glee Club, compared him to "aBach or aMozart", citing his "gifted musicality, superior musicianship and sight-reading ability".[23] He rings the bells ofLowell House.[24]
Elkies is acomposer andsolver ofchess problems (winning the 1996World Chess Solving Championship).[14] One of his problems appears in the chess trainerMark Dvoretsky's bookDvoretsky's Endgame Manual.[25] Elkies holds the title ofNational Master from theUnited States Chess Federation, but no longer plays competitively.[26]
In 1994, Elkies was aninvited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians inZürich.[27] In 2004, he received aLester R. Ford Award[28] and theLevi L. Conant Prize.[29] In 2017, Elkies was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences.[30]
Elkies spent eight years of his youth in Israel, and he came to New York City having read a Hebrew translation of Euclid but without any significant knowledge of English.
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