Noam Elkies

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Noam D. Elkies (born August 1966 in New York City) is a mathematician.

While an undergraduate at Columbia University, he was a three-time Putnam Fellow. He won the 1982 competition at the age of sixteen years and four months, making him possibly the youngest Putnam Fellow in history [1]. After graduating as valedictorian, he earned his Ph.D. under supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.

In 1987 he proved that an elliptic curve over the rational numbers is supersingular at infinitely many primes. In 1988, he disproved Euler's conjecture for fourth powers.

His work on these problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990. In July 1993, he was made a full, tenured professor at the age of only 26. This made him the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard, surpassing the record previously held by Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Summers (who were made full professor at age 28).

Elkies, along with A. O. L. Atkin, extended Schoof's algorithm to create the Schoof-Elkies-Atkin algorithm.

Elkies's Erdős number is 2.

He is also an accomplished composer of chess problems (winning the 1996 World Chess Solving Championship) and musical compositions. He is also an occasional author of anagrams, most notably: "Homo Sapiens = Ape's son, IMHO".

Elkies is also renowned for his knowledge of the connections between mathematics and music. He sits on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Mathematics and Music. He is also a member of the National Puzzlers' League, using the nom "Aleph".

Elkies is also a fellow at Harvard's Lowell House.

[edit] External link

• Personal site of Noam Elkies at Harvard University