In the history of higher institutions, Einstein was not the only youngest, the youngest Harvard professor right now has since broken the record of Albert Einstein, the great physicist, being the youngest in Germany back then in 1909. Here in the United States of America another record was set, and it was largely in a field a little bit different from Einstein’s.
Talking about the youngest professor, the professorial degree is conventionally and usually expected to be earned only at the early 50s of learned people. The popular belief is that no one can attain that academic feat at a young age and so it must be around their fiftieth year and beyond. On the contrary, septuagenarians and the rest have actually given the lead to young curious geniuses or bookworms who are coming hot after them.
Across universities of the world, and the historically best universities at that, there have been recent discoveries of the young generations who are consistently digging up new theories that stand as countercultural arguments against the fast fading intellectual logic of the old. Among them is the focus of this discussion on the of who is the youngest Harvard professor right now?
Biographical Sketch of Noam Elkies and Achievements
In 1966, the youngest Harvard scholar was born to an engineer father and a piano teacher mother, after which he attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City for three years before graduating in 1982 at age 15. He was born a child prodigy, in 1981. That is why at age 14, Elkies was awarded a gold medal at the 22nd International Mathematical Olympiad, receiving a perfect score of 42, one of the youngest to ever do so.
Noam Elkies 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. Elkies was a Putnam Fellow twice more during his undergraduate years. He graduated valedictorian of his class in 1985. He then earned his PhD in 1987 under the supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.
In 1987, Elkies proved that an elliptic curve over the rational numbers is super-singular at infinitely many primes. In 1988, he found a counterexample to Euler’s sum of powers conjecture for fourth powers. His work on these and other problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990.
Year of His Professorship
In 1993 exactly, Noam Elkies is a mathematician who became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard University at age 26. Elkies is also known for disproving Euler’s Sum of Powers Conjecture, a 200-year-old mathematical theory. Throughout his career he has received honors including the Lester R.
This made him the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard.
Read Also: Biography of the Highest Paid Professor at Harvard
Elkies’ Academic Pursuits and Intellectual Contributions
Along with A. O. L. Atkin he extended Schoof’s algorithm to create the Schoof–Elkies–Atkin algorithm. Elkies also studies the connections between music and mathematics; he is on the advisory board of the Journal of Mathematics and Music.
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 an associate of Harvard’s Lowell House. 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.
Finally, Elkies is the discoverer of many current and past record-holding elliptic curves, including the curve with the highest-known lower bound (≥28) on its rank, and the curve with the highest-known exact rank (=20).
