17 Facts About Noam Elkies

Noam David Elkies was born on August 25,1966 and is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University.

Noam Elkies is a pianist, chess national master, and chess composer.

Noam Elkies attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City for three years before graduating in 1982 at age 15.

Noam Elkies went on to Columbia University, where he won the Putnam competition at age 16 and four months, making him one of the youngest Putnam Fellows in history.

Noam Elkies was a Putnam Fellow twice more during his undergraduate years.

Noam Elkies then earned his PhD in 1987 under the supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.

From 1987 to 1990, Noam Elkies was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

In 1987, Noam Elkies proved that an elliptic curve over the rational numbers is supersingular at infinitely many primes.

In 1993, Noam Elkies was made a full, tenured professor at age 26.

Noam Elkies 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.

Noam Elkies is one of the principal investigators of the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, a large multi-university collaboration involving Boston University, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, and MIT.

Noam Elkies is the discoverer of many current and past record-holding elliptic curves, including the curve with the highest-known lower bound on its rank, and the curve with the highest-known exact rank.

Noam Elkies is a bass-baritone and formerly played the piano for the Harvard Glee Club.

Noam Elkies is a composer and solver of chess problems.

Noam Elkies holds the title of National Master from the United States Chess Federation, but no longer plays competitively.

In 1994, Noam Elkies was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich.

In 2017, Noam Elkies was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.