Manjul Bhargava

Some Lesser Known Facts About Manjul Bhargava

• Manjul Bhargava hails from an Indian family. His father, Dr. V. P. Muraleedharan, belongs to Payyanur in Kannur, Kerala.

• In the 1960s, his father moved to the United States after completing a master’s degree in Chemistry and married Meera Bhargava from Rajasthan.

• Manjul spent his childhood in Long Island, New York, where he also did the majority of his schooling.

• His first introduction to mathematics came from his mother, Mira Bhargava, who is herself a mathematician.

• At 14, he had already completed every mathematics and computer science course his high school offered.

• Manjul studied at Plainedge High School in North Massapequa, graduating in 1992 as the class valedictorian.

• Even though he often skipped classes as a child, he excelled academically, winning the First Annual New York State Science Talent Search

• Manjul later attended Harvard University, where he pursued mathematics and simultaneously engaged in diverse interests, including Sanskrit, music, table tennis, and social clubs.

• Bhargava’s passion for music led him to learn the tabla with celebrated gurus, including Zakir Hussain.

  

• Bhargava met Zakir Hussain while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. At just 18, he was already teaching math courses, and Hussain invited him to visit in California. Bhargava, in an interview, talked about his first meeting with Hussain and said,
  

  I met him when I was an undergraduate student at Harvard. He came to play there, and I was so excited and inspired. I used to play with one of his students there and he introduced us. I was already teaching as an undergraduate; I was teaching some of the math courses. He introduced me saying here’s an 18-year-old who already teaches mathematics courses at Harvard.”

• In 2001, Manjul earned his PhD from Princeton University. His dissertation, titled Higher Composition Laws, was completed under the guidance of mathematician Andrew Wiles with support from a Hertz Fellowship.

• In his PhD thesis, he extended Gauss’s law for binary quadratic forms, making it possible to understand better quartic and quintic number fields and their arithmetic properties.

• In 2001, Manjul joined the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) as a visiting scholar and served in this position until 2002. He served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 2002 to 2003.

  

• In 2003, he became a tenured full professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.

• In 2010, he joined the Stieltjes Chair at Leiden University.

• In 2015, Manjul Bhargava and Arul Shankar confirmed the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for a significant portion of elliptic curves.

• Manjul holds a deep admiration for Sanskrit poetry.

• He learnt Sanskrit from his grandfather, Purushottam Lal Bhargava, a scholar of Sanskrit and ancient Indian history.