Bjorn Poonen

Bjorn Mikhail Poonen (born 1968) is an American mathematician and Distinguished Professor in Science in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is primarily in arithmetic geometry, with occasional work in probability and computer science. Born in Boston to an Indian father and a Norwegian-American mother, he won the William Lowell Putnam Competition four times, in 1985 to 1988, and received a perfect score on the American High School Mathematics Examination in 1985. He graduated from Harvard in 1989 and completed a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 under Kenneth Ribet. After postdoctoral work at MSRI and Princeton he taught at Berkeley from 1997 to 2008 before moving to MIT. He is the founding managing editor of the journal Algebra and Number Theory. His honors include the 2011 Chauvenet Prize for his article Undecidability in number theory, the 2023 Joseph L. Doob Prize, and fellowship of the American Mathematical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.