elkies

Noam Elkies (Professor, Harvard University's Department of Mathematics; Chess Master; Composer/Pianist/Improviser) 

(Bio adapted from http://www.in.com/noam-elkies/biography-209689.html)

Noam D. Elkies is a Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, a Chess Master, and an accomplished composer, pianist, and improviser.

At age 14, Elkies received a gold medal with perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad. At Columbia University, he won the Putnam competition at age 16, making him one of the youngest Putnam Fellows in history; he was a Putnam Fellow two more times during his undergraduate years. After graduating as valedictorian at age 18, summa in Mathematics and Music, he earned his PhD, at age 20, under the supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.

In 1987, he proved that an elliptic curve over the rational numbers is supersingular at infinitely many primes. In 1988, he disproved Euler's sum of powers conjecture for fourth powers. His work on these problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990. 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. Elkies, along with A. O. L. Atkin, extended Schoof's algorithm to create the Schoof-Elkies-Atkin algorithm.

He is an accomplished composer and solver of chess problems, winning the 1996 World Chess Solving Championship. He has discovered many new patterns in Conway's Game of Life and has studied the mathematics of still life patterns in that cellular automaton rule. Elkies is also renowned for his knowledge of the connections between mathematics and music; he sits on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Mathematics and Music. Elkies is a fellow at Harvard's Lowell House, and is a faculty adviser to the Harvard Israel Review.

Webpage - www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies