Noam Elkies

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Noam Elkies in 2005

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

While an undergraduate at Columbia University, he was a three-time Putnam Fellow. Elkies graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1982^[1], and won the Putnam competition at the age of sixteen years and four months, making him one of the youngest Putnam Fellows in history.^[2] After graduating as valedictorian at age 18, summa in Mathematics and Music, he earned his Ph.D., at age 20, 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 sum of powers conjecture for fourth powers.

His work on these problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990. In 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 Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence Summers (who were made full professors 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.

Elkies is a member of the National Puzzlers' League, using the nom "Aleph". He is an accomplished composer of chess problems (winning the 1996 World Chess Solving Championship) and musical compositions. He has discovered many new patterns in Conway's Game of Life and has studied the mathematics of still life patterns in that cellular automaton rule. 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.

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