Manjul Bhargava (born 8 August 1974) is a Canadian-American mathematician of Indian origin. He is the R. Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, the Stieltjes Professor of Number Theory 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".
Bhargava was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in a Hindu family to immigrant parents from India and he grew up primarily in Long Island, New York. His mother Mira Bhargava, a mathematician at Hofstra University, was his first mathematics teacher. He completed all of his high school math and computer science courses by age 14. 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, 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. He also studied Sanskrit from his grandfather Purushottam Lal Bhargava, a well-known scholar of Sanskrit and ancient Indian history. He is an admirer of Sanskrit poetry.
Bhargava is the third youngest full professor in Princeton University's history. He was named one of Popular Science Magazine’s "Brilliant 10" in November 2002. He won the $10,000 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, shared with Kannan Soundararajan, awarded by SASTRA in 2005 at Thanjavur, India, for his outstanding contributions to number theory. In 2008, Bhargava was awarded the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize.
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".
In 2012, Bhargava was named an inaugural recipient of the Simons Investigator Award and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in its inaugural class of fellows.
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".
In 2015, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award of India. Please see the videos below to experience the simplicity of this Professor and get inspired by him.