Manjul Bhargava
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The pinnacle: The Fields Medal 2014
Indian-origin wizard wins 'Nobel Prize' of Mathematics
Chidanand Rajghatta,TNN | Aug 13, 2014 The Times of India
Manjul Bhargava was among the four winners of the 2014 Fields Medal, widely considered the Nobel Prize for Mathematics that has been mostly dominated by white men (Americans, Russians, French, and Britons: 38 medals between them) since it was instituted in 1936.
The award going to Princeton University's Manjul Bhargava, a Canadian-American maths wizard was no surprise. Although he is the first person of Indian origin, he was the hot favourite in pre-award polls among peers. Which is not surprising for someone who became a tenured full professor within two years of finishing graduate school, an Ivy League record, and the second youngest full professor in Princeton's history.
In early August 2014 as speculation heated up about possible 2014 winners of Fields Medal, an online poll put Bhargava on top with 516 votes
=The award
One to four Fields Medals are awarded once every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40 years at the International Congres of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), which meets every four years. (Hyderabad hosted it in 2010). Seoul is the venue of the 2014 presentation
The award is the highest recognition in the world of mathematics.
Manjul Bhargava’s work
Mathematics offers solutions to everyday issues from airline scheduling to Internet security, even though many practitioners pursue esoteric problems described in dense language incomprehensible to the layman. Bhargava's PhD thesis is said to have helped in the "determination of the asymptotic density of discriminants of quartic and quintic number fields."
Previous prizes and honours
Recognition came early. He has often recounted how in Grade 3, he became curious about how many oranges it takes to make a pyramid.
Manjul has also collaborated with many Indian mathematicians, and his work with fellow Princeton scholar Arul Shankar, his PhD student, won them the Fermat Prize in 2011. Manjul's own PhD advisor was Andrew Wiles, famous for proving Fermat's last theorem.
Bhargava 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." That came on top of almost every other top prize in maths, from the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2005 to the American mathematical Society's Cole Prize in 2008. So the Fields Medal comes as no great surprise to the mathematical community in the US or in India.
Family
Although a Canadian-American who was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Bhargava is no stranger to India or to Indian mathematicians. Indeed, his mother, Mira Bhargava, is herself a rare female mathematician, teaching at Hofstra University (another well-known female Indian-American mathematician is Bhama Srinivasan at the University of Chicago).
His mathematician mother and chemist father were well-to-do: they indulged him with oranges till he figured out the pyramid answer, which was not long coming.
Other interests
That's not all. Before you think all he does is crunch numbers, Bhargava is also an accomplished tabla player (tutored by Zakir Hussain) and has the number on Sanskrit, which he learned from his grandfather Purushottam Lal Bhargava, was the head of the Sanskrit department of the University of Rajasthan, during family visits to Jaipur. He sees close links between his three loves noting how beats of tabla and rhythms of Sanskrit poetry are highly mathematical.
