Music and Mathematics: Noam Elkies

Dinner with two old Harvard friends -- mathematician Noam Elkies and MSU physicist Dean Lee. Noam is in town this week to give a lecture, a colloquium, and perform a piano recital.

At 26 Noam became the youngest full professor in Harvard history, and the youngest to ever receive tenure. He has an amazing Wikipedia entry :-)

In 1981, at age 14, he was awarded a gold medal at the 22nd International Mathematical Olympiad, receiving a perfect score of 42 and becoming one of just 26 participants to attain this score,[3] and one of the youngest ever to do so. Elkies graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1982[4][5] and went on to Columbia University, where he won the Putnam competition at the age of sixteen years and four months, making him one of the youngest Putnam Fellows in history.[6] He was a Putnam Fellow two more times during his undergraduate years. After graduating as valedictorian at age 18 with a summa cum laude in Mathematics and Music, he earned his Ph.D. at the age 20 under the supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.[7]

From 1987 to 1990 he was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.[8]

In 1987, he proved that an elliptic curve over the rational numbers is supersingular at infinitely many primes. In 1988, he found a counterexample to Euler's sum of powers conjecture for fourth powers.[9] His work on these and other problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990.[4] In 1993, he was made a full, tenured professor at the age of 26. This made him the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard.[10] Along with A. O. L. Atkin he extended Schoof's algorithm to create the Schoof–Elkies–Atkin algorithm.

Noam, Dean, and I are all veterans of the Malkin Athletic Center weight room, when it was old-school and gritty :-)

Here's an earlier version of the talk Noam gave tonight. Video should start with him constructing a canon from thin air!