Bjorn Poonen
| Bjorn Poonen | |
|---|---|
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| Born | c. 1968 (age 43–44) Boston, Massachusetts |
| Nationality |  United States |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Kenneth Alan Ribet |
Bjorn Mikhail Poonen is a mathematician, four-time Putnam Competition winner and currently the Claude Shannon Professor of Mathematics at MIT.[1] His research is primarily in number theory and algebraic 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 300 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] the Journal of the American Mathematical Society,[9] the London Mathematical Society Journal of Computation and Mathematics,[10] and the A K Peters Research Notes in Mathematics book series[citation needed].
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[edit] Education
In 1989, Poonen graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in Mathematics and Physics, summa cum laude.[citation needed] He then studied under Kenneth Alan Ribet at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a Ph.D. there in 1994.[11]
[edit] Academic positions
Poonen held postdoctoral positions at MSRI and Princeton University and served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2008, before moving to MIT.[citation needed] He has also held visiting positions at the Isaac Newton Institute (1998 and 2005), the Université Paris-Sud (2001), Harvard University (2007), and MIT (2007).[citation needed]
[edit] Major honors and awards
- David and Lucile Packard Fellowship[12]
- Sloan Research Fellowship[13]
- 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, and Daniel Kane).[14]
- International Mathematical Olympiad: silver medalist in 1985.[15]
- American High School Mathematics Examination: only participant (out of 380,000) to receive a perfect score in 1985.[16]
[edit] Trivia
- He co-authored a paper entitled "How to spread rumors fast".[17]
- His Erdős-Bacon number is 5: he co-authored scholarly articles with Andrew Granville,[18] Wen-Ch'ing Winnie Li,[19] Andrew Odlyzko,[20] and Peter Winkler,[21] all of whom have Erdős number 1;[22] and he appeared in the documentary Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem[23] narrated by Danica McKellar, who has Bacon number 2.[24]
[edit] References
- ^ MIT Mathematics Faculty
- ^ Amir Dembo, Qi-Man Shao, Bjorn Poonen, and Ofer Zeitouni, "Random polynomials with few or no real zeros", J. Amer. Math. Soc. 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, Math. Assoc. of America, 2002.
- ^ Bjorn Poonen and Yuri Tschinkel (eds.), Arithmetic of Higher-Dimensional Algebraic Varieties, Progress in Math. 226, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2004.
- ^ MathSciNet author citations
- ^ Algebra & Number Theory
- ^ Involve (mathematics journal)
- ^ Journal of the American Mathematical Society
- ^ LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics
- ^ Mathematics Genealogy
- ^ Packard fellows in mathematics
- ^ Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 45, no. 6, (June–July 1998), p. 723.
- ^ Putnam competition results
- ^ International Mathematical Olympiad results
- ^ 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.
- ^ Brian Conrey, Andrew Granville, Bjorn Poonen, and Kannan Soundararajan, "Zeros of Fekete polynomials", Ann. Inst. Fourier (Grenoble) 50 (2000), no. 3, 865--889.
- ^ A. R. Calderbank, Wen-Ch'ing Winnie Li, and Bjorn Poonen, A 2-adic approach to the analysis of cyclic codes, IEEE Trans. Inform. Th. 43 (1997), 1-11.
- ^ Andrew Odlyzko and Bjorn Poonen, Zeros of polynomials with 0,1 coefficients, L'Enseign. Math 39 (1993), 317-348.
- ^ E. G. Coffman, Jr., Bjorn Poonen, and Peter Winkler, Packing random intervals, Prob. Theory Relat. Fields 102 (1995), 105--121.
- ^ The Erdős number project
- ^ Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem
- ^ The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia
