Bjorn Poonen
Bjorn Mikhail Poonen is a mathematician, four-time Putnam Competition winner, and a Distinguished Professor in Science in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] His research is primarily in arithmetic geometry, but he has occasionally published in other subjects such as probability[2] and computer science.[3] He has edited two books,[4][5] and his research articles have been cited by approximately 1,000 distinct authors.[6] He is the founding managing editor of the journal Algebra & Number Theory,[7] and serves also on the editorial boards of Involve[8] and the A K Peters Research Notes in Mathematics book series.[9]
Bjorn Poonen | |
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Bjorn Poonen at Oberwolfach in 2011 | |
Born | c. 1968 (age 52–53) |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley Harvard University |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | MIT |
Thesis | The Mordell-Weil theorem, rigidity, and pairings for Drinfeld modules (1994) |
Doctoral advisor | Kenneth Alan Ribet |
Doctoral students | |
Website | math |
Education
Poonen is a 1985 alumnus of Winchester High School in Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1989, Poonen graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in Mathematics and Physics, summa cum laude. He then studied under Kenneth Alan Ribet at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a Ph.D. there in 1994.[10]
Academic positions
Poonen held postdoctoral positions at Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Princeton University and served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2008, before moving to MIT.[9] He has also held visiting positions at the Isaac Newton Institute (1998 and 2005), the Université Paris-Sud (2001), Harvard (2007), and MIT (2007).[9]
Major honors and awards
- Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012.[11]
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences: elected in 2012[12]
- Chauvenet Prize: the 2011 winner, for his article "Undecidability in number theory"[13]
- Miller Research Professorship - University of California Berkeley.
- David and Lucile Packard Fellowship[14]
- Sloan Research Fellowship[15]
- William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition: winner in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988 (the only other four-time winners since 1938 are Don Coppersmith, Arthur Rubin, Ravi D. Vakil, Gabriel Carroll, Reid W. Barton, Daniel Kane and Brian R. Lawrence).[16]
- International Mathematical Olympiad: silver medalist in 1985.[17]
- American High School Mathematics Examination: only participant (out of 380,000) to receive a perfect score in 1985.[18]
Trivia
- He co-authored a paper entitled "How to spread rumors fast".[19]
References
- "All Positions Directory | MIT Mathematics". math.mit.edu. Retrieved 2016-10-23.
- Amir Dembo, Qi-Man Shao, Bjorn Poonen, and Ofer Zeitouni, "Random polynomials with few or no real zeros", Journal of the American Mathematical Society 15 (2002), 857-892.
- Bjorn Poonen, "The worst case in Shellsort and related algorithms", J. Algorithms 15 (1993), 101-124.
- Kiran Kedlaya, Bjorn Poonen, and Ravi Vakil, The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition 1985-2000: Problems, Solutions, and Commentary, Mathematical Association of America, 2002.
- Bjorn Poonen and Yuri Tschinkel (eds.), Arithmetic of Higher-Dimensional Algebraic Varieties, Progress in Mathematics 226, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2004.
- MathSciNet author citations
- Algebra & Number Theory
- Involve (mathematics journal)
- Curriculum vitae, retrieved 2015-01-28.
- Bjorn Poonen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-05-26.
- "American Academy of Arts & Sciences". www.amacad.org. Retrieved 2016-10-23.
- "Chauvenet Prizes | Mathematical Association of America". mathdl.maa.org. Retrieved 2016-10-23.
- Packard fellows in mathematics Archived April 15, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 45, no. 6, (June–July 1998), p. 723.
- "Putnam Competition Individual and Team Winners | Mathematical Association of America". www.maa.org. Retrieved 2016-10-23.
- "International Mathematical Olympiad". www.imo-official.org. Retrieved 2016-10-23.
- American High School Mathematics Examination results, page 31
- C. Kenneth Fan, Bjorn Poonen, and George Poonen, "How to spread rumors fast", Mathematics Magazine 70 (1997), 40-46.