Manjul Bhargava Receives 2008 Cole Prize

January 7, 2008

Providence, RI:

Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University has received the 2008 AMS Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory. Presented every three years by the American Mathematical Society, the Cole Prize is one of the highest distinctions in number theory. The prize was awarded today at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, California.

The prize citation noted Bhargava's "revolutionary work on higher composition laws", which introduced completely new and unexpected ideas into a subject that began with work of Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1801. "[Bhargava's] techniques and insights ... are dazzling; even in the case considered by Gauss, they lead to a new and clearer presentation of that theory," the prize citation says. "If Bhargava had stopped with this discovery, his work would already be quite remarkable. But Bhargava has gone on to use his composition laws to solve a new case of one of the fundamental questions of number theory, that of asymptotic enumeration of number fields of given degree, as the discriminant grows... Bhargava used his new composition laws to solve the degree 4 case, brilliantly overcoming very serious analytic problems that had completely blocked all previous work on the problem."

Find out more about AMS prizes at http://www.ams.org/prizes-awards.

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