Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Ellenberg is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he has been since 2004. His research centers on the fields of number theory and algebraic geometry, the parts of mathematics which address fundamental questions about algebraic equations and their solutions in whole numbers. Ellenberg’s research has uncovered new and unexpected connections between these subjects and algebraic topology, the study of abstract high-dimensional shapes and the relations between them.

Ellenberg has been writing for a general audience about math for more than fifteen years; his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Wired, The Believer, and The Boston Globe, and he is the author of the “Do the Math” column in Slate. His Wired feature story on compressed sensing appeared in the Best Writing on Mathematics 2011 anthology. His novel, The Grasshopper King (Coffee House Press, 2003), was a finalist for the 2004 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. His 2014 book How Not To Be Wrong (Penguin, 2014) was a New York Times and Sunday Times (London) bestseller and was one of Bill Gates’ top five summer books; it has been published in sixteen countries.

He has lectured about his research across the United States and internationally. He has held an NSF-CAREER grant and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, in 2013 he was named one of the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, in 2015 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2018 a Simons Fellow.

Ellenberg went to college at Harvard, got a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins, and then returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. in math. After graduate school, he was a postdoc at Princeton.