Congratulation to first Indian Mathematician Manjul Bhargava from Mathsworld.in
Indian-origin
wizard wins Fields Medal 'Nobel Prize' of Mathematics
Mathematicians of Indian- and Iranian-origin
are among the four winners of the 2014 Fields Medal, widely considered the
Nobel Prize for maths that has been broadly dominated by white males 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 favorite in pre-award polls among peers.
The sensational co-winner is Maryam Mirzakhani, a female Iranian mathematician
who teaches at Stanford University. It is the first time a female mathematician
has won the Fields medal; all 52 previous winners have been men in a field
traditionally dominated by the male of the species.
Expectedly, it created a ripple in the rarefied maths world.
Mirzakhani's success was "hugely symbolic and I hope it will encourage
more women to get into mathematics because we need more women. I am very happy
that now we can put to rest that particular 'it has never happened
before'," Ingrid Daubechies, herself the first female president of the
International mathematical Union (IMU), said while announcing the award.
The two other winners this year are Artur Avila from Brazil and Martin Hairer
from Austria. Avila is also the first Brazilian and Latin American to win the
medal.
One to four Fields Medals are awarded once every four years to mathematicians
under the age of 40 years at the International Congress of the International
Mathematical Union (IMU), which meets every four years. The presentation will
take place in Seoul on Wednesday at the quadrennial IMU Congress (Hyderabad
hosted it in 2010).
Although the prize money ($15,000) is chump change (approximately 1/100th)
compared to the Nobel Prize, the award, long dominated by Americans, Russians,
French, and Britons (38 medals between them), is the highest recognition in the
world of mathematics.
Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields instituted it at a time
mathematicians felt short-changed that they had no Nobel recognition. The Nobel
Prize is awarded for literature, peace, economics, physiology or medicine,
chemistry and physics — but not for mathematics.
Legend — or the apocryphal story — goes that Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who
instituted the Nobel Prize, disdained maths after someone he loved cheated on
him — with a mathematician. But there is no historical basis to the story. More
likely fact is that Nobel didn't care much for maths because it was not
considered a practical science from which humanity could benefit (a chief
purpose for creating the Nobel Foundation).
All that has changed, of course. 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, for instance, is said to
have helped in the "determination of the asymptotic density of
discriminants of quartic and quintic number fields."
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).
Canadian-American maths wizard Manjul Bhargava.
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.
Last week, as speculation heated up about possible 2014 winners of Fields
Medal, an online poll put Bhargava on top with 516 votes, with Avila coming
second with 486 votes. Apparently, his peers pretty much expected it. 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.
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.
Such recognition came to him early. In past interviews, he has often recounted
how in Grade 3, he became curious about how many oranges it takes to make a
pyramid. Just as well his mathematician mother and chemist father were well-to-do:
they indulged him with oranges till he figured out the answer, which was not
long coming. Now he's at the pinnacle of his calling.
TOI dated 17th aug 2014
