Fields Medal for Leiden Professor of Number Theory Manjul Bhargava
Leiden Professor of Number Theory Manjul Bhargava has been awarded a Fields Medal, widely regarded as the Nobel Prize for Maths. Bhargava is a professor in Princeton, and since 2010 has also been the holder of the Stieltjes chair in Leiden.
Manjul Bhargava is the holder of the so-called Stieltjes chair, an endowed chair at Leiden University. Since 2006 he has given lectures in Leiden and carried out research in partnership with Leiden Professor of Number Theory Hendrik Lenstra. ‘In the letters of recommendation for his appointment in Leiden, Bhargava (1974) was spoken of in glowing terms: everything that he touches turns to gold,’ Lenstra commented.
Bhargava has received many prestigious awards, including the Clay Research Award (2005), the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2005) and the AMS Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory (2008). At Harvard, where he gave lectures even as an undergraduate, he was awarded the teaching prize in three consecutive years. In March 2013 Bhargava was admitted to the Inaugural Class of AMS Fellows of the ‘Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Program’, together with Leiden Professors Frank den Hollander and Hendrik Lenstra.
The Fields Medal, an award for outstanding mathematicians up to the age of 40, has been awarded since 1936 once every four years to a maximum of four candidates. This is a highly distinguished prize, that owes more to its prestige than to its financial reward. It carries a prize of 15,000 dollars, compared to the Nobel Prize worth 1 million dollars.