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".[4][5][6] He was also a member of the Padma Award committee in 2023.[7]
Education and career
Bhargava was born to an Indian family in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, but grew up and attended school primarily on Long Island, New York. His mother Mira Bhargava, a mathematician at Hofstra University, was his first mathematics teacher.[8][9] He completed all of his high school math and computer science courses by age 14.[10] He attended Plainedge High School in North Massapequa, and graduated in 1992 as the class valedictorian. He obtained his AB from Harvard University in 1996. For his research as an undergraduate, he was awarded the 1996 Morgan Prize. Bhargava went on to pursue graduate studies at Princeton University, where he completed a doctoral dissertation titled "Higher composition laws" under the supervision of Andrew Wiles and received his PhD in 2001, with the support of a Hertz Fellowship.[11] He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2001–02,[12] 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 has also studied the tabla under gurus such as Zakir Hussain.[13] He also studied Sanskrit from his grandfather Purushottam Lal Bhargava, a scholar of Sanskrit and ancient Indian history.[14][15] He is an admirer of Sanskrit poetry.[16]
Career and research
Bhargava’s 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 the asymptotic behavior of the arithmetic properties of these orders and fields.
Four Fields medallists left to right (Artur Avila, Martin Hairer (at back), Maryam Mirzakhani, with Maryam's daughter Anahita) and Bhargava at the ICM 2014 in Seoul
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.
He received the Morgan Prize in 1996.[21] and Hertz Fellowship[22] He was named one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" in November 2002. He then received a Clay 5-year Research Fellowship and the Merten M. Hasse Prize from the MAA in 2003,[23] the Clay Research Award, the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, and the Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics in 2005.
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
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.
In 2009, he was awarded the Face of the Future award at the India Abroad Person of the Year ceremony in New York City.[26] In 2014, the same publication gave the India Abroad Publisher's Prize for Special Excellence.[27]
In 2011, he was awarded the Fermat Prize for "various generalizations of the Davenport-Heilbronn estimates and for his startling recent results (with Arul Shankar) on the average rank of elliptic curves".[28] In 2012, Bhargava was named an inaugural recipient of the Simons Investigator Award,[29] and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in its inaugural class of fellows.[30] He was awarded the 2012 Infosys Prize in mathematics for his "extraordinarily original work in algebraic number theory, which has revolutionized the way in which number fields and elliptic curves are counted".[31]
In 2014, Bhargava was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul[15] 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".[33]
In 2015, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award of India.[34]
In 2017, Bhargava was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[35] In 2018, Bhargava was named as the inaugural occupant of The Distinguished Chair for the Public Dissemination of Mathematics at The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath). This is the first visiting professorship in the United States dedicated exclusively to raising public awareness of mathematics.[36] Bhargava was conferred a Fellowship at the Royal Society in 2019.[37]
^Pólya, Georg (1 January 1919). "Über ganzwertige Polynome in algebraischen Zahlkörpern". Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik (Crelle's Journal). 1919 (149). Walter de Gruyter GmbH: 97–116. doi:10.1515/crll.1919.149.97. ISSN0075-4102. S2CID120316910.
