A mathematician of Indian-origin has won the prestigious Fields Medal, known as the ‘Nobel Prize for mathematics’.
Manjul Bhargava, a Canadian-American professor of mathematics at Princeton University, was among four winners of the celebrated award.
Iranian-born Maryam Mirzakhani, who works in the US, has become the first ever female winner of the Fields Medal.
The medals will be presented in Seoul at the International Congress of Mathematicians, held every four years.
The other winners of the prize are Prof Martin Hairer from the University of Warwick, UK, and Dr Artur Avila, a Brazilian mathematician who earned his PhD in dynamical systems at the age of 21.
Mr Bhargava “is awarded a Fields Medal for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves,” according to the award citation.
The IMU website says Mr Bhargava’s work in number theory has had “a profound influence” on the field.
“A mathematician of extraordinary creativity, he has a taste for simple problems of timeless beauty, which he has solved by developing elegant and powerful new methods that offer deep insights.”
Born in 1974 in Canada, he grew up primarily in the US and spent some time in India. He has been teaching at Princeton since 2003.
The Fields Medal, established by Canadian mathematician John Fields, is regarded as akin to a Nobel Prize for maths and comes with a 15,000 Canadian dollar (£8,000) cash prize.
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