An Indian-origin professor of mathematics at the reputed Princeton University has bagged the coveted Fields Medal, widely regarded as the ‘Nobel’ Prize for mathematics.
Manjul Bhargava, a 40-year-old Canadian-American, has won the 2014 medal along with three others, including an Iranian woman professor at Stanford University, who is the first-ever woman to achieve the honour.
Bhargava has been chosen “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”, said the International Mathematical Union (IMU).
Describing Bhargava as “a mathematician of extraordinary creativity”, the IMU said his work in number theory has had “a profound influence on the field”. “Bhargava’s work is based both on a deep understanding of the representations of arithmetic groups and a unique blend of algebraic and analytic expertise,” it noted.
Apart from Bhargava, another Indian-origin mathematician, Subhash Khot, has won the IMU’s Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, for his “prescient definition of the “Unique Games” problem, and leading the effort to understand its complexity and its pivotal role in the study of efficient approximation of optimization problems”.
A professor at the New York University’s Computer Science Department, Khot’s work is said to have led to breakthroughs in algorithmic design and approximation hardness, and to new exciting interactions between computational complexity, analysis and geometry.