The Morgan Prizefor Outstanding Research

by an UndergraduateTurns Twenty

Joseph A. Gallian

The twentieth AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Bren-nie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research inMathematics by an Undergraduate Student wasawarded at the Joint Mathematics Meetings inSan Antonio in January 2015 to Harvard graduateLevent Alpoge. In the previous six months MorganPrize winner Manjul Bhargava received the FieldsMedal, and Morgan Prize winner Jacob Lurie wonone of the inaugural US$3,000,000 Breakthroughin Mathematics Prizes and a MacArthur (“genius”)Grant. In view of the awards to Bhargava and Lurie,a brief overview of the career paths of the twentyMorgan Prize winners is of interest.

1995: Kannan Soundararajan is professor anddirector of the Mathematics Research Center atStanford. He obtained a bachelor’s degree atMichigan and a PhD at Princeton in 1998 underPeter Sarnak. His honors include an AmericanInstitute of Mathematics Five-Year Post DoctoralFellowship, the 2003 Salem Prize, the 2005 SASTRARamanujan Prize, the 2011 Infosys Prize, and aninvited address at the 2010 International Congressof Mathematicians.

Joseph A. Gallian is professor of mathematics at the Univer-sity of Minnesota Duluth. His email address is jgallian@d.umn.edu.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1224

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Manjul Bhargava

1996: Manjul Bhargava is the R. Bran-don Fradd Professor of Mathematicsat Princeton University and the Stielt-jes Professor of Number Theory atLeiden University. He earned a bache-lor’s degree from Harvard and a PhDdegree from Princeton in 2001 underAndrew Wiles. Among his awards area Clay Mathematics Institute Five-YearLong-Term Prize Fellowship, a ClayResearch Award in 2005, the 2005SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, the 2008AMS Cole Prize in number theory, the2011 Fermat Prize, the 2012 Infosys Prize, and aFields Medal in 2014.

19981: Jade Vinson has been at Renaissance Tech-nologies since 2006, where he develops automatedtrading of financial instruments using mathemati-cal and statistical methods and risk management.He obtained a bachelor’s degree at WashingtonUniversity and a PhD at Princeton in 2001 underPeter Sarnak. He held positions at the WhiteheadInstitute in 2001–2004 and at the Broad Insti-tute in 2004–2006. Vinson is a member of the

1For the first two prizes the designated year of the prize wasthe year the nomination was due. Starting in 1998 the des-ignated year was the year the prize was given. So there wasno gap in 1997.

April 2015 Notices of the AMS 395

Board of Trustees of the Museum of Mathematicsin New York and has published papers in com-binatorics, discrete geometry, complex analysis,measure theory, number theory, potential theory,and genomics.

1998: Daniel Biss is a member of the Illinois Senate.He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard anda PhD from MIT in 2002 under Michael Hopkins. Hewas a Clay Five-Year Long-Term Research Fellow,a visiting scholar at the Institute for AdvancedStudy, and an assistant professor at the Universityof Chicago. He served in the Illinois House ofRepresentatives from 2011 to 2013 and received66 percent of the vote in the 2012 Illinois electionfor the senate.

2000: Sean McLaughlin is a software engineer atEngineers Gate LLP in Brooklyn, New York. Hereceived a bachelor’s degree from the Universityof Michigan and a master’s degree in computerscience from Carnegie Mellon University. He hasheld positions at Jane Street Capital and Google.McLaughlin has published five papers in the areasof discrete geometry, computer science, and logic.

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Jacob Lurie

2001: Jacob Lurie is a professor atHarvard. He received a bachelor’sdegree from Harvard and a PhDfrom MIT in 2004 under the super-vision of Michael Hopkins. He held apostdoctoral fellowship at Harvardfrom 2004 to 2007, was associateprofessor at MIT in 2007–2009, andbecame a professor at Harvard in2009. Lurie was one of the inau-gural winners of the US$3,000,000Breakthrough Prize in Mathematicsin 2014 and received a MacArthur“Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2014.Much of his research appears in two

major treatises: Higher Topos Theory and HigherAlgebra.

2002: Ciprian Manolescu is a professor at UCLA.He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvardand a PhD from Harvard in 2004, supervised byPeter Kronheimer. He has been a Clay ResearchFellow, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, and anassistant professor at Columbia before movingto UCLA in 2008. He received the EuropeanMathematical Society Prize in 2012 and the RobertSorgenfrey Distinguished Teaching Award at UCLAin 2011. Manolescu has published papers in Annalsof Mathematics, Duke Mathematical Journal, andMathematische Annalen.

2003: Joshua Greene is an assistant professor atBoston College. He received a bachelor’s degreefrom Harvey Mudd and a PhD from Princeton in2009 under Zoltán Szabó. He has held an NSFGraduate Research Fellowship and an Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He wasan NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ColumbiaUniversity from 2009–2011 and has publishedpapers in Annals of Mathematics, the AmericanJournal of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae,Advances in Mathematics, and the Bulletin of theLondon Mathematical Society.

2004: Melanie Wood is an assistant professor atthe University of Wisconsin-Madison. She receiveda bachelor’s degree from Duke and a PhD fromPrinceton in 2009 under Manjul Bhargava. Shehas received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, aFulbright fellowship, an NSF graduate fellowship,and an American Institute of Mathematics Five-Year Fellowship. Wood was a Szego AssistantProfessor at Stanford from 2009–2011. She hasgiven invited addresses at the MathFest of theMathematical Association of America and at theJoint Mathematics Meetings; she also gave a PiMu Epsilon J. Sutherland Frame lecture. Wood haspublished over fifteen papers in number theory.

2005: Reid Barton is a PhD candidate at Harvard.He received a bachelor’s degree from MIT. He isa consultant for Dropbox and was employed atKsplice.

2006: Jacob Fox is a professor at Stanford. Hereceived a bachelor’s degree from MIT and a PhDfrom Princeton in 2010 under Benny Sudakov. Hiswork is supported by a Packard Fellowship, anNSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan ResearchFellowship. He was previously supported by aSimons Foundation Fellowship and an MIT NECCorporation grant. He received the SIAM DiscreteMathematics Dénes König Prize in 2010 and anEdmund F. Kelly Research Award from MIT in 2012.Fox has over sixty-five publications with thirty-seven coauthors in journals such as Annals ofMathematics, Journal of the American Mathemati-cal Society, SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics,Advances in Mathematics and Duke MathematicalJournal. He has given over eighty-five invited talks,among them was one at the 2014 InternationalCongress of Mathematicians.

2007: Daniel Kane is an assistant professor witha joint appointment in mathematics and computerscience at UC San Diego. He obtained a bachelor’sdegree from MIT and a PhD from Harvard in2011 under Barry Mazur, Benedict Gross, andHenry Cohn. He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowat Stanford from 2011–2014. Kane has publishedover fifty papers with forty-seven coauthors inmathematics and computer science.

2008: Nathan Kaplan is a Gibbs Assistant Professorat Yale. He received a bachelor’s degree fromPrinceton and a PhD from Harvard in 2013 underNoam Elkies. Kaplan has published twelve articleson number theory, semigroups, and monoids. He

396 Notices of the AMS Volume 62, Number 4

has appeared on the television game shows “WhoWants to Be a Millionaire” and “Million SecondQuiz.”

2009: Aaron Pixton holds a postdoctoral positionat Harvard supported by a Clay MathematicsInstitute Five-Year Long-Term Prize Fellowship.He received a bachelor’s degree from Princetonand a PhD from Princeton in 2013 under RahulPandharipande. Pixton has published ten papersin algebraic geometry and number theory.

2010: Scott Kominers is a Junior Fellow at theHarvard Society of Fellows, a research scientist atthe Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics,and an associate of the Harvard Center for Researchon Computation and Society. He has a bachelor’sdegree from Harvard and received a PhD in businesseconomics from Harvard in 2011. From 2011 until2013, he was the inaugural Research Scholar atthe Becker Friedman Institute for Research inEconomics at the University of Chicago. Kominershas published twenty-five papers in areas such asnumber theory, game theory, economics, socialand behavioral sciences, and discrete geometry.

2011: Maria Monks is a PhD candidate and HertzFoundation Fellow at UC Berkeley specializing inalgebraic combinatorics. She received a bachelor’sdegree from MIT and has published six papers inthe areas of discrete mathematics, combinatorics,and number theory.

2012: John Pardon is a PhD candidate at Stanford.He has eight publications in the areas of mani-folds and cell complexes, probability theory, andalgebraic geometry. His papers have appeared injournals such as Annals of Mathematics, Annalsof Probability, and the Journal of the AmericanMathematical Society.

2013: Fan Wei is a PhD candidate at Harvard. Shereceived a bachelor’s degree from MIT and hasworked at Microsoft and GE Energy. Wei has threepublications in combinatorics.

2014: Eric Larson is a PhD candidate and HertzFoundation Fellow at MIT. He received a bachelor’sdegree from Harvard and has published six papersin the areas of algebraic geometry and numbertheory.

2015: Levent Alpoge is a Churchill Scholar at theUniversity of Cambridge. He received a bachelor’sdegree from Harvard and will attend graduateschool at Princeton in 2015. Alpoge has publishedsix papers in number theory and combinatorics.

Harvard has had eight Morgan Prize winners,followed by MIT with four and Princeton with three.For graduate schools chosen by the Morgan Prizerecipients, Princeton leads with eight, followed byHarvard with six and MIT with three.

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April 2015 Notices of the AMS 397