Manjul Bhargava
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Manjul Bhargava (मञ्जुल भार्गव) (born 1974) is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. His research interests span algebraic number theory, combinatorics, and representation theory. He graduated from Harvard University in 1996 and received his doctorate from Princeton in 2001, working under Andrew Wiles. His breakthrough Ph.D. thesis surprised the mathematical community by generalizing the classical Gauss composition law for quadratic forms to many other situations. He has expanded and rewritten his results in a series of papers published in the prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics. One major use of his results is the parametrization of quartic and quintic orders in number fields, thus allowing the study of asymptotic behaviour of arithmetic properties of these rings. He was given full tenure two years after graduate school.
Bhargava has won a staggering number of awards for his research, including the AMS–MAA–SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize, a Clay Research Fellowship, the Clay Research Award in 2005, and the Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics. He was named one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” in November 2002. He also recently won the $10,000 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, shared with Kannan Soundararajan, awarded by SASTRA in Tanjavur, India, for his outstanding contributions to number theory.
His contributions include:
- 13 new Gauss composition laws, including the quartic and quintic degree cases.
- Proof of the 15 theorem, including an extension of the theorem to other number sets such as prime numbers.
- Proof of the 290 theorem.
- A novel generalization of the factorial function, resolving a decades-old conjecture by George Pólya.
Manjul is also a very good tabla player, having studied under Zakir Hussain. He is also interested in Sanskrit.
