Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Ellenberg grew up in Potomac, Maryland, the child of two statisticians. He excelled in mathematics from a young age, and competed for the United States in the International Mathematical Olympiad three times, winning two gold medals and a silver. He went to college at Harvard, got a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University, and then returned to Harvard for his PhD in math. After graduate school, he was a postdoc at Princeton. In 2004, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he is now the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics.

Ellenberg’s 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 15 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, and his 2014 book How Not To Be Wrong was a New York Times and Sunday Times (London) bestseller and has been published in sixteen countries.

He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife Tanya Schlam and their two children.

Presenting: How Not to Be Wrong