Bjorn Poonen

Bjorn Poonen is a mathematician and currently Professor of Mathematics at MIT. His research is primarily in number theory and algebraic geometry, but he has occasionally published in other subjects such as probability^[1] and computer science^[2]. He has edited two books^[3][4], and his research articles have been cited by approximately 300 distinct authors.^[5] He is the founding managing editor of the journal Algebra & Number Theory^[6], and serves also on the editorial boards of International Mathematics Research Notices^[7], 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]}.

[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 before moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 1997.^{[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

• Poonen is cited in the Wikipedia page on the number 12.
• 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

• Personal webpage[1]

1. ^ 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.
2. ^ Bjorn Poonen, "The worst case in Shellsort and related algorithms", J. Algorithms 15 (1993), 101-124.
3. ^ Kiran Kedlaya, Bjorn Poonen, and Ravi Vakil, The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition 1985-2000: Problems, Solutions, and Commentary, Math. Assoc. of America, 2002.
4. ^ Bjorn Poonen and Yuri Tschinkel (eds.), Arithmetic of Higher-Dimensional Algebraic Varieties, Progress in Math. 226, Birkhäuser, 2004.
5. ^ MathSciNet author citations
6. ^ Algebra & Number Theory
7. ^ International Mathematics Research Notices
8. ^ Involve (mathematics journal)
9. ^ Journal of the American Mathematical Society
10. ^ LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics
11. ^ Mathematics Genealogy
12. ^ Packard fellows in mathematics
13. ^ Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 45, no. 6, (June-July 1998), p. 723.
14. ^ Putnam competition results
15. ^ International Mathematical Olympiad results
16. ^ American High School Mathematics Examination results, page 31
17. ^ C. Kenneth Fan, Bjorn Poonen, and George Poonen, "How to spread rumors fast", Mathematics Magazine 70 (1997), 40-46.
18. ^ Brian Conrey, Andrew Granville, Bjorn Poonen, and Kannan Soundararajan, "Zeros of Fekete polynomials", Ann. Inst. Fourier (Grenoble) 50 (2000), no. 3, 865--889.
19. ^ 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.
20. ^ Andrew Odlyzko and Bjorn Poonen, Zeros of polynomials with 0,1 coefficients, L'Enseign. Math 39 (1993), 317-348.
21. ^ E. G. Coffman, Jr., Bjorn Poonen, and Peter Winkler, Packing random intervals, Prob. Theory Relat. Fields 102 (1995), 105--121.
22. ^ The Erdős number project
23. ^ Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem
24. ^ The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia