A Number Theorist Who Connects Math to Other Creative Pursuits
“There are many different pathways into mathematics,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “There is the stereotype that interest in math displays itself early. That is definitely not true in general. It’s not the universal story — but it is my story.”
That account was backed up by a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania — his mother, Susan Ellenberg. “Jordan recognized numbers before he could walk,” she said. “We’d be going someplace with him, and he’d start to call out numbers, and his father and I would have to figure out where he was seeing them. Each night, he’d ask me to teach him something new about math.” When he was in second grade, a local teacher began taking him through the high school math curriculum. Ever since, he’s been preoccupied with mathematics — though not exclusively so.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1993, Ellenberg completed a one-year master’s program in fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University, where he wrote a novel that was published a decade later, titled The Grasshopper King. But he always felt that he would eventually return to mathematics, and in 1994 he entered a doctoral program back at Harvard, pursuing research under the supervision of Barry Mazur, a number theorist.
