Terence "Terry" Chi-Shen Tao FAA FRS (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese:

; pinyin: To Zhxun) (born 17 July 1975, Adelaide), is an Australian-American mathematician

working in a number of areas of mathematics, but currently focuses on harmonic analysis, partial
differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric
combinatorics,compressed sensing and analytic number theory. He currently holds the James
and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles. Tao was a corecipient of the 2006 Fields Medal and the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
Tao maintains a personal mathematics blog,[2] which has been described by Timothy Gowers as
"the undisputed king of all mathematics blogs".

Personal life
Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university level
mathematics courses at the age of nine. He and Lenhard Ng are the only two children in the
history of the Johns Hopkins' Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of
700 or greater on the SAT math section while just nine years old. Tao scored a 760. [3] In 1986,
1987, and 1988, Tao was the youngest participant to date in the International Mathematical
Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten, winning a bronze, silver, and gold medal respectively.
He remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad's history, winning
the gold medal shortly after his thirteenth birthday. At age 14, Tao attended the Research
Science Institute. When he was 15 he published his first assistant paper. He received his
bachelor's and master's degrees at the age of 16 from Flinders University under Garth Gaudry. In
1992 he won aFulbright Scholarship to undertake postgraduate study in the United States. From
1992 to 1996, Tao was a graduate student atPrinceton University under the direction of Elias
Stein, receiving his PhD at the age of 21.[4] He joined the faculty of the University of California,
Los Angeles in 1996. When he was 24, he was promoted to full professor at UCLA and remains
the youngest person ever appointed to that rank by the institution.
Tao's father was born and grew up in Shanghai, and Tao's mother is Cantonese [5] His parents are
first generation immigrants fromHong Kong to Australia.[6] His father, Billy Tao (Chinese:
; pinyin: To Xinggu) is a pediatrician, and his mother, Grace Tao, is a physics and
mathematics graduate from the University of Hong Kong, formerly a secondary school teacher
of mathematics inHong Kong.[7]
Tao has two brothers living in Australia, both of whom represented Australia at the International
Mathematical Olympiad.

Nigel Tao was part of the team at Google Australia that created Google Wave.[8] He now
works on the Go programming language.

Trevor Tao has a double degree in mathematics and music and is an autistic savant.[8]

Tao, his wife Laura, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,[9] and their son and
daughter live in Los Angeles, California

Research and awards

Within the field of mathematics, Tao is most known for his collaboration with Ben J. Green of
Oxford University; together they proved theGreenTao theorem. Known for his collaborative mind
set, by 2006 Tao had worked with over 30 others in his discoveries.[10]
In a book review, the mathematician Timothy Gowers remarked on Tao's accomplishments:

Tao's mathematical knowledge has an extraordinary combination o

working in those areas. How he does all this, as well as writing pap

Tao has won numerous honors and awards.[11] He received the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bcher
Memorial Prize in 2002, and the Clay Research Award in 2003, for his contributions to analysis
including work on the Kakeya conjecture and wave maps. In 2005, he received the American
Mathematical Society's Levi L. Conant Prize with Allen Knutson, and in 2006 he was awarded
the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize.
In 2004, Ben Green and Tao released a preprint proving what is now known as the GreenTao
theorem. This theorem states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime
numbers. The New York Times described it this way:[12][13]

In 2004, Dr. Tao, along with Ben Green, a mathematician now at th

For this and other work Tao was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal of 2004.
In August 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, he became one
of the youngest persons, the first Australian, and the first UCLA faculty member ever to be
awarded a Fields Medal.[14][15]
An article by New Scientist[16] writes of his ability:

Such is Tao's reputation that mathematicians now compete to inter

Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007.[17] He is a corresponding member of
the Australian Academy of Science, and in 2007 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.[18]
[19]

In the same year Tao also published Tao's inequality,[20] an extension to theSzemerdi

regularity lemma in the field of information theory.

In April 2008, Tao received the Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes an early career
scientist for outstanding contributions in their field. In addition to a medal, Waterman awardees
also receive a $500,000 grant for advanced research. [21]
In December 2008, he was named the Lars Onsager lecturer[22] of 2008, for "his combination of
mathematical depth, width and volume in a manner unprecedented in contemporary
mathematics". He was presented the Onsager Medal, and held his Lars Onsager lecture entitled
"Structure and randomness in the prime numbers"[23] at NTNU, Norway.
Tao was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. [24]
In 2010, he received the King Faisal International Prize jointly with Enrico Bombieri.[25] Also in
2010, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics[26] and the Polya Prize (SIAM).[27] Tao
and Van H. Vu solved the circular law conjecture.
Tao also made contributions to the study of the ErdsStraus conjecture in 2011 by showing that
the number of solutions to the ErdsStraus equation increases polylogarithmically as n tends to
infinity.
In 2012 he and Jean Bourgain received the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences.[28][29] Also, in 2012, he was selected as a Simons Investigator.
[30]

He proved that every odd integer greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes. [31]

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Sciences (Corresponding

Member), the National Academy of Sciences (Foreign member), the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and the American Mathematical Society.[32] In 2006, he received the Fields
Medal "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and
additive number theory", and in 2006, he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. He has been
featured in The New York Times, CNN, USA Today,Popular Science, and many other media
outlets.[33]
As of 2013 Tao has published over 250 research papers and 17 books. [34] He has an Erds
number of 2.[35]
In 2014 Tao received a CTY Distinguished Alumni Honor from Johns Hopkins Center for Gifted
and Talented Youth in front of 963 attendees in 8th and 9th grade that are in the same program
that Tao graduated from.

I am a Professor at the Department of Mathematics, UCLA. I work in a number of

mathematical areas, but primarily in harmonic analysis, PDE, geometric
combinatorics,arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, compressed sensing,

and algebraic combinatorics. I am part of the Analysis Group here at UCLA, and also
an editor or associate editor at several mathematical journals. Here are my papers and
preprints, my books, my research blog, and the group blog on mathematics in
Australia that I administrate.

I maintain a harmonic analysis mailing list and contributed to

theDispersiveWiki project. I used to maintain a harmonic analysis page for
conferences and other links.

Think you might know me from somewhere? Here's how you can contact me. If you
are a representative of the media, please visit this page instead.

In the fall quarter, I will be teaching Math 275A (Probability).

Maryam Mirzakhani (Persian: ; born May 1977) is an Iranian[1] mathematician

working in the United States. Since 1 September 2008, she has served as
a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.[5][6][7]
In 2014, Mirzakhani became both the first woman and the first Iranian honored with the Fields
Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics.[8][9][10][11][12][13] The award committee cited her
work in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces.
Her research topics include Teichmller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory,
and symplectic geometry.[1]

Early life and education

Mirzakhani was born in 1977 in Tehran, Iran. She went to high school
in Tehran at Farzanegan, National Organization for Development of Exceptional
Talents (NODET). In 1994, Mirzakhani won a gold medal in the International Mathematical
Olympiad, the first female Iranian student to do so. In the 1995 International Mathematical
Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold
medals.[14][15][16]
She obtained her BSc in mathematics (1999) from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. She
went to the United States for graduate work, earning a PhD from Harvard University (2004),
where she worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis McMullen. She was also a
2004 research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and a professor at Princeton University.[17]

Research work
Mirzakhani has made several contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces.
In her early work, Mirzakhani discovered a formula expressing the volume of amoduli space with
a given genus as a polynomial in the number of boundary components. This led her to obtain a
new proof for the formula discovered by Edward Witten andMaxim Kontsevich on the intersection
numbers of tautological classes on moduli space,[5] as well as an asymptotic formula for the
growth of the number of simple closedgeodesics on a compact hyperbolic surface.[18] Her
subsequent work has focused on Teichmller dynamics of moduli space. In particular, she was
able to prove the long-standing conjecture that William Thurston's earthquake flow
on Teichmller space is ergodic.[19]
Most recently as of 2014, with Alex Eskin and with input from Amir Mohammadi, Mirzakhani
proved that complex geodesics and their closures in moduli space are surprisingly regular, rather

than irregular or fractal.[20][21] The closures of complex geodesics are algebraic objects defined in
terms of polynomials and therefore they have certain rigidity properties, which is analogous to a
celebrated result that Marina Ratner arrived at during the 1990s.[21] The International
Mathematical Union said in its press release that, "It is astounding to find that the rigidity in
homogeneous spaces has an echo in the inhomogeneous world of moduli space." [21]
Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 for "her outstanding contributions to
the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".[22]
At the time of the award, Wisconsin professor Jordan Ellenberg explained her research to a
popular audience:
... [Her] work expertly blends dynamics with geometry. Among other things, she studies billiards.
But now, in a move very characteristic of modern mathematics, it gets kind of meta: She
considers not just one billiard table, but the universe of all possible billiard tables. And the kind of
dynamics she studies doesn't directly concern the motion of the billiards on the table, but instead
a transformation of the billiard table itself, which is changing its shape in a rule-governed way; if
you like, the table itself moves like a strange planet around the universe of all possible tables ...
This isn't the kind of thing you do to win at pool, but it's the kind of thing you do to win a Fields
Medal. And it's what you need to do in order to expose the dynamics at the heart of geometry; for
there's no question that they're there.[23]
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran congratulated her.[24]

Personal life[edit]
She is married to Jan Vondrk, a Czech theoretical computer scientist who works at IBM
Almaden Research Center.[25][26] They have a daughter named Anahita.[27]

Awards and honors[

Fields Medal 2014[10][28][29]

Plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2014)

Clay Research Award 2014[30]

The 2013 AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics. "Presented every two years by
the American Mathematical Society, the Satter Prize recognizes an outstanding contribution

to mathematics research by a woman in the preceding six years. The prize was awarded on
Thursday, 10 January 2013, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego." [31]

Invited to talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of

"Topology and Dynamical Systems & ODE" [32]

AMS Blumenthal Award 2009 [31]

Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow 2004[33]

Harvard Junior Fellowship Harvard University, 2003[1]

Merit fellowship Harvard University, 2003[1]

IPM Fellowship, Tehran, Iran, 199599[1]

Named one of Nature's ten "people who mattered" of 2014.[34]

Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.[35]

Maryam Mirzakhani has become the first woman to win the Fields Medal,
the most prestigious prize in mathematics. Mirzakhani, 37, is of Iranian
descent and completed her PhD at Harvard in 2004. Her thesis showed
how to compute the Weil-Petersson volumes of moduli spaces of bordered
Riemann surfaces. Her research interests include Teichmller theory,
hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. She is
currently professor of mathematics at Stanford University, and
predominantly works on geometric structures on surfaces and their
deformations.
What are some of your earliest memories of mathematics?

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was

reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find. I never thought I
would pursue mathematics until my last year in high school. I grew up in a
family with three siblings. My parents were always very supportive and
encouraging. It was important for them that we have meaningful and
satisfying professions, but they didn't care as much about success and
achievement.

In many ways, it was a great environment for me, though these were hard
times during the Iran-Iraq war. My older brother was the person who got
me interested in science in general. He used to tell me what he learned in
school. My first memory of mathematics is probably the time that he told
me about the problem of adding numbers from 1 to 100. I think he had read
in a popular science journalhow Gauss solved this problem. The solution
was quite fascinating for me. That was the first time I enjoyed a beautiful
solution, though I couldn't find it myself.
What experiences and people were especially influential on your mathematical education?

I was very lucky in many ways. The war ended when I finished elementary
school; I couldn't have had the great opportunities that I had if I had been
born 10 years earlier. I went to a great high school in Tehran Farzanegan
and had very good teachers. I met my friend Roya Beheshti during the
first week of middle school. It is invaluable to have a friend who shares your
interests, and it helps you stay motivated.
Our school was close to a street full of bookstores in Tehran. I remember
how walking along this crowded street, and going to the bookstores, was so
exciting for us. We couldn't skim through the books like people usually do
here in a bookstore, so we would end up buying a lot of random books.
Also, our school principal was a strong-willed woman who was willing to go
a long way to provide us with the same opportunities as the boys' school.
Later, I got involved in Math Olympiads that made me think about harder
problems. As a teenager, I enjoyed the challenge. But most importantly, I
met many inspiring mathematicians and friends at Sharif University. The
more I spent time on mathematics, the more excited I became.
Could you comment on the differences between mathematical education in Iran and in the US?

It is hard for me to comment on this question since my experience here in

the US is limited to a few universities, and I know very little about the high
school education here. However, I should say that the education system in
Iran is not the way people might imagine here. As a graduate student at
Harvard, I had to explain quite a few times that I was allowed to attend a
university as a woman inIran. While it is true that boys and girls go to
separate schools up to high school, this does not prevent them from
participating say in the Olympiads or the summer camps.

But there are many differences: In Iran you choose your major before going
to college, and there is a national entrance exam for universities. Also, at
least in my class in college, we were more focused on problem-solving than
on taking advanced courses.
What attracted you to the particular problems you have studied?

When I entered Harvard, my background was mostly combinatorics and

algebra. I had always enjoyed complex analysis, but I didn't know much
about it. In retrospect, I see that I was completely clueless. I needed to learn
many subjects which most undergraduate students from good universities
here know.
I started attending the informal seminar organized by Curt McMullen.
Well, most of the time I couldn't understand a word of what the speaker
was saying. But I could appreciate some of the comments by Curt. I was
fascinated by how he could make things simple and elegant. So I started
regularly asking him questions, and thinking about problems that came out
of these illuminating discussions.
His encouragement was invaluable. Working with Curt had a great
influence on me, though now I wish I had learned more from him. By the
time I graduated I had a long list of raw ideas that I wanted to explore.
Can you describe your research in accessible terms? Does it have applications within other areas?

Most problems I work on are related to geometric structures on surfaces

and their deformations. In particular, I am interested in understanding
hyperbolic surfaces. Sometimes properties of a fixed hyperbolic surface can
be better understood by studying the moduli space that parameterises all
hyperbolic structures on a given topological surface.
These moduli spaces have rich geometries themselves, and arise in natural
and important ways in differential, hyperbolic, and algebraic geometry.
There are also connections with theoretical physics, topology, and
combinatorics. I find it fascinating that you can look at the same problem
from different perspectives and approach it using different methods.
What do you find most rewarding or productive?

Of course, the most rewarding part is the "Aha" moment, the excitement of
discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new the feeling of
being on top of a hill and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing

mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in
sight.
I find discussing mathematics with colleagues of different backgrounds one
of the most productive ways of making progress.
What advice would you give those who would like to know more about mathematics what it is, what its
role in society has been, and so on?

This is a difficult question. I don't think that everyone should become a

mathematician, but I do believe that many students don't give mathematics
a real chance. I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I
was just not interested in thinking about it. I can see that without being
excited mathematics can look pointless and cold. The beauty of
mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.

Manjul Bhargava (born 8 August 1974[1]) is an Canadian-American mathematician. He is the R.

Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, the Stieltjes Professor of
Number Theory[2] at Leiden University, and also holds Adjunct Professorships at the Tata Institute
of Fundamental Research, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and the University of
Hyderabad. He is known primarily for his contributions to number theory.
Bhargava was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014. According to the International Mathematical
Union citation, he was awarded the prize "for developing powerful new methods in the geometry
of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of
elliptic curves.

Education and career

Bhargava was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada of parents who had emigrated from India, and
he grew up primarily in Long Island,New York. His mother, a mathematician at Hofstra University,
was his first mathematics teacher.[4] He completed all of his high school math and computer
science courses by age 14.[5] He attended Plainedge High School in North Massapequa, and
graduated in 1992 as the class valedictorian. He obtained his B.A. from Harvard University in
1996. For his research as an undergraduate, he was awarded the 1996 Morgan Prize. Bhargava
went on to receive his doctorate from Princeton in 2001, supervised by Andrew Wiles and funded
by a Hertz Fellowship. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2001-02,
[6]

and at Harvard University in 2002-03. Princeton appointed him as a tenured Full Professor in

2003. He was appointed to the Stieltjes Chair in Leiden University in 2010.

Bhargava is also an accomplished tabla player, having studied under gurus such as Zakir
Hussain.[7] He also studied Sanskrit from his grandfather Purushottam Lal Bhargava, a wellknown scholar of Sanskrit and ancient Indian history.[8] He is an admirer of Sanskrit poetry.[9]

Contributions
His PhD thesis generalized Gauss's classical law for composition of binary 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 andp-adic analysis, to the study of ideal class
groups of algebraic number fields, and to the arithmetic theory of elliptic curves.[10] A short list of
his specific mathematical contributions are:

Fourteen new Gauss-style composition laws.

Determination of the asymptotic density of discriminants of quartic and quintic number

fields.

Proofs of the first known cases of the Cohen-Lenstra-Martinet heuristics for class groups.

Proof of the 15 theorem, including an extension of the theorem to other number sets such
as the odd numbers and the prime numbers.

Proof (with Jonathan Hanke) of the 290 theorem.

A novel generalization of the factorial function, resolving a decades-old conjecture by

George Plya.

Proof (with Arul Shankar) that the average rank of all elliptic curves over Q (when ordered
by height) is bounded.

In July 2010 Manjul Bhargava and Arul Shankar proved the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
conjecture for a positive proportion of elliptic curves.[11]

Awards and honors

Bhargava has won several awards for his research, the most prestigious being the Fields Medal,
the highest award in the field of mathematics, which he won in 2014.
Bhargava is the third youngest full professor in Princeton University's history, after Charles
Fefferman and Andrew Wiles.
In addition, he won the Morgan Prize[12] and Hertz Fellowship[13] in 1996, a Clay 5-year Research
Fellowship, the Merten M. Hasse Prize from the MAA in 2003,[14] 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:[15]

At mathematics he's at the very top end. For a guy so young I can'

He was named one of Popular Science Magazines "Brilliant 10" in November 2002. He won 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 American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize.[16] The citation
reads:

Bhargavas original and surprising contribution is the discovery of l

In 2011, Bhargava was awarded the Fermat Prize for "various generalizations of the DavenportHeilbronn estimates and for his startling recent results (with Arul Shankar) on the average rank of
elliptic curves".[17]
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.
[18]

He was also the 2011 Simons Lecturer at MIT.[19]

In 2012, Bhargava was named an inaugural recipient of the Simons Investigator Award, [20] and
became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in its inaugural class of fellows.[21]
Bhargava was also awarded the 2012 Infosys Prize in mathematics for his "extraordinarily
original work in algebraic number theory, which has revolutionized the way in whichnumber
fields and elliptic curves are counted".[22]
In 2013, Bhargava was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.[23]
In 2014, Bhargava was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of
Mathematicians in Seoul[8] for "developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers,
which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves". [24]
In 2015, Bhargava was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award of India

Manjul Bhargava, the counting numbers dont simply line themselves up in a demure
row. Instead, they take up positions in space on the corners of a Rubiks Cube, or
the two-dimensional layout of the Sanskrit alphabet, or a pile of oranges brought
home from the supermarket. And they move through time, in the rhythms of a
Sanskrit poem or a tabla drumming sequence.
Bhargavas mathematical tastes, formed in his earliest days, are infused with music
and poetry. He approaches all three realms with the same goal, he says: to express
truths about ourselves and the world around us.
The soft-spoken, boyish mathematician could easily be mistaken for an
undergraduate student. He projects a quiet friendliness that makes it easy to forget
that the 40-year-old is widely considered one of the towering mathematical figures of
his age. Hes very unpretentious, said Benedict Gross, a mathematician at
Harvard University who has known Bhargava since the latters undergraduate days.
He doesnt make a big deal of himself.
Yet the search for artistic truth and beauty has led Bhargava, a mathematics
professor at Princeton University, to some of the most profound recent discoveries in
number theory, the branch of mathematics that studies the relationships between
whole numbers. In the past few years, he has made great strides toward
understanding the range of possible solutions to equations known as elliptic curves,
which have bedeviled number theorists for more than a century.
His work is better than world-class, said Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory
University in Atlanta. Its epoch-making.
Today, Bhargava was named one of this years four recipients of the Fields Medal,
widely viewed as the highest honor in mathematics.
Bhargava lives in a wonderful, ethereal world of music and art, Gross said. He
floats above the normal concerns of daily life. All of us are in awe of the beauty of his
work.
Bhargava has his own perspective that is remarkably simple compared to others,
saidAndrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal. Somehow,
he extracts ideas that are completely new or are retwisted in a way that changes
everything. But it all feels very natural and unforced its as if he found the right
way to think.

From early childhood, Bhargava displayed a remarkable mathematical intuition.

Teach me more math! he would badger his mother, Mira Bhargava, a
mathematics professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. When he was 3
years old and a typical, rambunctious toddler, his mother found that the best way to
keep him from bouncing off the walls was to ask him to add or multiply large
numbers.
It was the only way I could make him stay still, she recalled. Instead of using paper
and pencil, he would kind of flip his fingers back and forth and then give me the right
answer. I always wondered how he did it, but he wouldnt tell me. Perhaps it was too
intuitive to explain.
Bhargava saw mathematics everywhere he looked. At age 8, he became curious about
the oranges he would stack into pyramids before they went into the family juicer.
Could there be a general formula for the number of oranges in such a pyramid? After
wrestling with this question for several months, he figured it out: If a side of a
triangular pyramid has length n, the number of oranges in the pyramid is n(n+1)
(n+2)/6. That was an exciting moment for me, he said. I loved the predictive
power of mathematics.
Bhargava quickly became bored with school and started asking his mother if he could
go to work with her instead. She was always very cool about it, he recalled.
Bhargava explored the university library and went for walks in the arboretum. And,
of course, he attended his mothers college-level math classes. In her probability
class, the 8-year-old would correct his mother if she made a mistake. The students
really enjoyed that, Mira Bhargava said.
Every few years, Bhargavas mother took him to visit his grandparents in Jaipur,
India. His grandfather, Purushottam Lal Bhargava, was the head of the Sanskrit
department of the University of Rajasthan, and Manjul Bhargava grew up reading
ancient mathematics and Sanskrit poetry texts.
To his delight, he discovered that the rhythms of Sanskrit poetry are highly
mathematical. Bhargava is fond of explaining to his students that the ancient
Sanskrit poets figured out the number of different rhythms with a given number of
beats that can be constructed using combinations of long and short syllables: Its the
corresponding number in what Western mathematicians call the Fibonacci sequence.
Even the Sanskrit alphabet has an inherent mathematical structure, Bhargava
discovered: Its first 25 consonants form a 5 by 5 array in which one dimension

specifies the bodily organ where the sound originates and the other dimension
specifies a quality of modulation. The mathematical aspect excited me, he said.
At Bhargavas request, his mother started teaching him to play tabla, a percussion
instrument of two hand drums, when he was 3 (he also plays the sitar, guitar and
violin). I liked the intricacy of the rhythms, he said, which are closely related to the
rhythms in Sanskrit poetry. Bhargava eventually became an accomplished player,
even studying tabla with the legendary Zakir Hussain in California. He has
performed in concert halls around the country and even at Central Park in New York
City.
Hes a terrific musician who has reached a very high technical level, said Daniel
Trueman, a music professor at Princeton who collaborated with Bhargava on a
performance over the Internet with musicians in Montreal. Just as important, he
said, is Bhargavas warmth and openness. Even though Truemans background is not
primarily in Indian music, I never felt that I was offending his high level of
knowledge of North Indian classical music, Trueman said.
Bhargava often turns to the tabla when he is stuck on a mathematics problem, and
vice versa. When I go back, my mind has cleared, he said.
He experiences playing the tabla and doing mathematics research similarly, he said.
Indian classical music like number theory research is largely improvisational.
Theres some problem-solving, but youre also trying to say something artistic, he
said. Its similar to math you have to put together a sequence of ideas that
enlightens you.
Mathematics, music and poetry together feel like a very complete experience,
Bhargava said. All kinds of creative thoughts come together when I think about all
three.
Mathematician
Between attending his mothers classes and traveling to India, Bhargava missed a lot
of school over the years. But on the days he didnt go to school, he would often meet
his schoolmates in the afternoon to play tennis and basketball. Despite his
extraordinary intelligence, he was just a normal kid, associating with all the kids,
Mira Bhargava recalled. They were completely at ease with him.
Thats a refrain repeated by Bhargavas colleagues, students and fellow musicians,
who describe him using words like sweet, charming, unassuming, humble

and approachable. Bhargava wears his mathematical superstardom lightly, said

Hidayat Husain Khan, a professional sitarist based in Princeton and India who has
performed with him. He has the ability to connect with a huge spectrum of people,
regardless of their background.
The only time that Bhargavas extended school absences threatened to harm him was
when his high school health teacher tried to block him from graduating even
though he was the valedictorian and had been accepted to Harvard. (He did
graduate.)
It was at Harvard that Bhargava decided, once and for all, to pursue a career in
mathematics. With such eclectic interests, he had flirted with many possible careers
musician, economist, linguist, even mountain climber. Eventually, however, he
realized that it was usually the mathematical aspects of these subjects that got him
most excited.
Somehow, I always came back to math, he said.
Bhargava felt the strongest tug between mathematics and music but decided in the
end that it would be easier to be a mathematician who did music on the side than a
musician who did mathematics on the side. In academia, you can pursue your
passions, he said.
Now, Bhargava has an office on the 12th floor of Princetons Fine Hall littered with
math toys Rubiks Cubes, Zometools, pine cones and puzzles. When he is thinking
about mathematics, however, Bhargava prefers to escape his office and wander in the
woods. Most of the time when Im doing math, its going on in my head, he said.
Its inspirational being in nature.
This approach can have its drawbacks: More than once, Bhargava has postponed
writing down an idea for years only to forget the specifics. At times, however, delays
between thinking and writing are inevitable. Sometimes, when I have a new idea,
there hasnt been language developed to express it yet, he said. Sometimes, its just
a picture in my mind of how things should flow.
Although Bhargava uses his office primarily for meetings, the mathematical toys
decorating its surfaces are more than just a colorful backdrop. When he was a
graduate student at Princeton, they helped him solve a 200-year-old problem in
number theory.

If two numbers that are each the sum of two perfect squares are multiplied together,
the resulting number will also be the sum of two perfect squares (Try it!). As a child,
Bhargava read in one of his grandfathers Sanskrit manuscripts about a
generalization of this fact, developed in the year 628 by the great Indian
mathematician Brahmagupta: If two numbers that are each the sum of a perfect
square and a given whole number times a perfect square are multiplied together, the
product will again be the sum of a perfect square and that whole number times
another perfect square. When I saw this math in my grandfathers manuscript, I got
very excited, Bhargava said.
There are many other such relationships, in which numbers that can be expressed in
a particular form can be multiplied together to produce a number with another
particular form (sometimes the same form and sometimes a different one). As a
graduate student, Bhargava discovered that in 1801, the German mathematical giant
Carl Friedrich Gauss came up with a complete description of these kinds of
relationships if the numbers can be expressed in what are known as binary quadratic
forms: expressions with two variables and only quadratic terms, such as x2 + y2 (the
sum of two squares), x2 + 7y2, or 3x2 + 4xy + 9y2. Multiply two such expressions
together, and Gauss composition law tells you which quadratic form you will end
up with. The only trouble is that Gauss law is a mathematical behemoth, which took
him about 20 pages to describe.
Bhargava wondered whether there was a simple way to describe what was going on
and whether there were analogous laws for expressions involving higher exponents.
He has always been drawn, he said, to questions like this one problems that are
easy to state, and when you hear them, you think theyre somehow so fundamental
that we have to know the answer.
The answer came to him late one night as he was pondering the problem in his room,
which was strewn with Rubiks Cubes and related puzzles, including the Rubiks
mini-cube, which has only four squares on each face. Bhargava who used to be able
to solve the Rubiks Cube in about a minute realized that if he were to place
numbers on each corner of the mini-cube and then cut the cube in half, the eight
corner numbers could be combined in a natural way to produce a binary quadratic
form.
There are three ways to cut a cube in half making a front-back, left-right or topbottom division so the cube generated three quadratic forms. These three forms,
Bhargava discovered, add up to zero not with respect to normal addition, but with
respect to Gauss method for composing quadratic forms. Bhargavas cube-slicing
method gave a new and elegant reformulation of Gauss 20-page law.

Additionally, Bhargava realized that if he arranged numbers on a Rubiks Domino

a 2x3x3 puzzle he could produce a composition law for cubic forms, ones whose
exponents are three. Over the next few years, Bhargava discovered 12
morecomposition laws, which formed the core of his Ph.D. thesis. These laws are not
just idle curiosities: They connect to a fundamental object in modern number theory
called an ideal class group, which measures how many ways a number can be
factored into primes in more complicated number systems than the whole numbers.
His Ph.D. thesis was phenomenal, Gross said. It was the first major contribution
to Gauss theory of composition of binary forms for 200 years.
Magician
Bhargavas doctoral research earned him a five-year Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship,
awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Providence, R.I., to new Ph.D.s who
show leadership potential in mathematics research. He used the fellowship to spend
one additional year at Princeton and the neighboring Institute for Advanced Study
and then moved to Harvard. Only two years into his fellowship, however, job offers
started pouring in, and a bidding war soon erupted over the young mathematician.
It was a crazy time, Bhargava said. At 28, he accepted a position at Princeton,
becoming the second-youngest full professor in the universitys history.
Back at Princeton, Bhargava felt like a graduate student again and had to be
reminded by his former professors that he should call them by their first names now.
That was a little weird, he said. Bhargava ordered some frictionless chairs for his
office, and he and his graduate student friends would race down the halls of Fine Hall
in the evenings. One time, another professor happened to be there in the evening,
and he came out of his office, Bhargava said. That was rather embarrassing.
Bhargava is glad to be at an institution where he has the opportunity to teach. As an
undergraduate teaching assistant at Harvard, he won the Derek C. Bok Awardfor
excellence in teaching three years running. He especially enjoys reaching out to
students in the arts or humanities, some of whom may think of themselves as
mathphobic. Because I came to math through the arts, it has been a passion of mine
to bring in people who think of themselves as more on the art side than the science
side, he said. Over the years, Bhargava has taught classes on the mathematics of
music, poetry and magic. I think anyone is reachable if the material is presented in
the right way, he said.
Carolyn Chen, a Princeton undergraduate who took Bhargavas freshman seminar on
mathematics and magic, called the course super chill. Bhargava started each class

by performing a magic trick something he loves to do and then the students

dissected its mathematical principles. Bhargavas colleagues had warned him to steer
clear of proofs, he said, but by the end of the course, everyone was coming up with
proofs without realizing thats what they were doing.
The course inspired Chen and several classmates to take more proof-based
mathematics classes. I took number theory after that freshman seminar, she said.
I would never have thought of taking it if I hadnt taken his class, but I really
enjoyed it.
At Princeton, Bhargava started developing an arsenal of techniques for
understanding the geometry of numbers, a field somewhat akin to his childhood
orange counting that studies how many points on a lattice lie inside a given shape. If
the shape is fairly round and compact, like a pyramid of oranges, the number of
lattice points inside the shape corresponds approximately to the shapes volume. But
if the shape has long tentacles, it may capture many more or many fewer lattice
points than a round shape of the same volume. Bhargava developed a way to
understand the number of lattice points that appear in such tentacles.
He has applied this method to one problem after another in number theory and just
knocked them off, Gross said. Its a beautiful thing to watch.
While Bhargavas early work on composition laws was a solo flight, much of his
subsequent research has been in collaboration with others, something he describes
as a joyous experience. Working with Bhargava can be intense: At times, said
Xiaoheng Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, he and Bhargava have begun
discussing a math problem, and the next thing he knows, seven hours have passed.
Characteristically, Bhargava is quick to deflect the honor of winning the Fields Medal
onto his collaborators. Its as much theirs as mine, he said.
In recent years, Bhargava has collaborated with several mathematicians to study
elliptic curves, a type of equation whose highest exponent is three. Elliptic curves are
one of the central objects in number theory: They were crucial to the proof
of Fermats Last Theorem, for example, and also have applications in
cryptography.
A fundamental problem is to understand when such an equation has solutions that
are whole numbers or ratios of whole numbers (rational numbers). Mathematicians
have long known that most elliptic curves have either one rational solution or
infinitely many, but they couldnt figure out, even after decades of trying, how many
elliptic curves fall into each category. Now, Bhargava has started to clear up this

mystery. WithArul Shankar, his former doctoral student who is now a postdoc at
Harvard, Bhargava has shown that more than 20 percent of elliptic curves
have exactly one rational solution. And with Christopher Skinner, a colleague
at Princeton, and Wei Zhang of Columbia University, Bhargava has shown that at
least 20 percent of elliptic curves have an infinite set of rational solutions with a
particular structure called rank 1.
Bhargava, Skinner and Zhang have also made progress toward proving the
famousBirch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, a related problem about elliptic
curves for which the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a million-dollar
prize. Bhargava, Skinner, and Zhang have shown that the conjecture is true for
more than 66 percent of elliptic curves.
Bhargavas work on elliptic curves has opened a whole world, Gross said. Now
everybody is excited about it and jumping in to work on it with him.
He has proven some of the most exciting theorems in the past 20 years of number
theory, Ono said. The questions he attacks sound like things he shouldnt have the
right to answer.
Bhargava has developed a unique mathematical style, Gross said. You could look at
a paper and say, Manjuls the only one who could have done that. Its the mark of a
really great mathematician that he doesnt have to sign his work.