Bjorn Mikhail Poonen is a mathematician, four-time Putnam Competition winner and currently the Claude Shannon Professor of Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Education
Poonen is a 1985 alumnus of Winchester High School in Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1989, Poonen graduated from Harvard with an Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics, summa cum laude. He then studied under Kenneth Alan Ribet at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a Doctor of Philosophy there in 1994.
Career
His research is primarily in number theory and algebraic geometry, but he has occasionally published in other subjects such as probability and computer science. He has edited two books, and his research articles have been cited by approximately 500 distinct authors. He is the founding managing editor of the journal Algebra & Number Theory, and serves also on the editorial boards of Involve and the A K Peters Research Notes in Mathematics book series.
Poonen is a 1985 alumnus of Winchester High School in Winchester, Massachusetts.
Poonen held postdoctoral positions at MSRI and Princeton University and served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2008, before moving to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also held visiting positions at the Isaac Newton Institute (1998 and 2005), the Université Paris-Sud (2001), Harvard University (2007), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007). He co-authored a paper entitled "How to spread rumors fast".
His Erdős-Bacon number is 3: he co-authored scholarly articles with Andrew Granville, Wen-Ch"ing Winnie Li, Andrew Odlyzko, and Peter Winkler, all of whom have Erdős number 1. And he appeared in the documentary Julia Robinson and Hilbert"s Tenth Problem narrated by Danica McKellar, who has Bacon number 2.
Poonen proposed the Big Mouth Conjecture in April 2014, proving it minutes later during a faculty talent show at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Membership
American Mathematical Society. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.