| Manjul Bhargava | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 8, 1974 Hamilton, Ontario |
| Nationality | Canadian American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Alma mater | Harvard University Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Andrew Wiles |
| Doctoral students | Wei Ho Arul Shankar Michael Volpato Melanie Wood |
| Known for | Gauss composition laws 15 and 290 theorems |
| Notable awards | Fermat Prize (2011) Cole Prize (2008) Clay Research Award (2005) SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2005) Hasse Prize (2003) Morgan Prize (1996) |
Manjul Bhargava (मञ्जुल भार्गव) (born August 8, 1974[1]) is a Canadian-American mathematician of Indian origin. He is the R. Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. He is known primarily for his contributions to number theory.
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Bhargava's mother, Mira Bhargava, is a mathematician at Hofstra University and his father is a chemist. Bhargava grew up in Long Island, NY. [2] Manjul Bhargava completed all of his high school math and computer courses by age 14.[3] He attended Plainedge High School, graduating in 1992 as the class valedictorian. He obtained his B.A. from Harvard University in 1996 and received his doctorate from Princeton in 2001, working under Andrew Wiles. Princeton hired him at the rank of tenured full professor within only two years of finishing graduate school, which is considered a record in the Ivy League.[4] He is still the youngest standing tenured full professor at Princeton.
Bhargava is also an accomplished tabla player, having studied under gurus such as Zakir Hussain. [5]. He has also studied Sanskrit. His grandfather Dr. Purushottam Lal Bhargava is a well-known scholar of Sanskrit and ancient Indian history.
His Ph.D. thesis generalized the classical Gauss composition law for quadratic forms to many other situations. One major use of his results is the parametrization of quartic and quintic orders in number fields, thus allowing the study of asymptotic behavior of arithmetic properties of these orders and fields.
His research also includes fundamental contributions to the representation theory of quadratic forms, to interpolation problems and p-adic analysis, to the study of ideal class groups of algebraic number fields, and to the arithmetic theory of elliptic curves.[6] A short list of his specific mathematical contributions are:
In July 2010 Manjul Bhargava and Arul Shankar proved the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for a positive proportion of elliptic curves.[7]
Bhargava is the second youngest full professor in Princeton University's history, after Charles Fefferman (professor at Princeton at age 24). [8]
Bhargava has won several awards for his research, including the Morgan Prize[9] in 1996, the Merten M. Hasse Prize from the MAA in 2003,[10] 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 in 2005.
Peter Sarnak of Princeton University has said of Bhargava[11]:
| “ | 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 | ” |
He was named one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” in November 2002. He recently won the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize and the $10,000 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, shared with Kannan Soundararajan, awarded by SASTRA in 2005 at Tanjavur, India, for his outstanding contributions to number theory.
In 2008, Bhargava was awarded the Cole Prize.[12] 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 | ” |
Bhargava is also a sought-after speaker, having given numerous public lectures around the world. In 2011, he delivered the prestigious Hedrick lectures of the MAA in Lexington, Kentucky.[13] He was also the 2011 Simons Lecturer at MIT.[14]
In 2011, Bhargava was awarded the Fermat Prize for his work on various generalizations of the Davenport-Heilbronn estimates and for his startling recent results (with Arul Shankar) on the average rank of elliptic curves.[15]