Biography:Mehtaab Sawhney

From HandWiki
Mehtaab Sawhney
Born
Mehtaab Singh Sawhney

(1998-09-20) September 20, 1998 (age 27)[citation needed]
Alma materUniversity of Pennsylvania (attended)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, PhD)
AwardsMorgan Prize (2021)
Clay Research Fellowship (2024)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsMIT
Cambridge University
Columbia University
OpenAI
ThesisProbabilistic and analytic methods in combinatorics (2024)
Doctoral advisorYufei Zhao

Mehtaab Sawhney (born September 20, 1998)[citation needed] is an American mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and number theory. He is an assistant professor at Columbia University.

Early life and education

Sawhney grew up in Commack, New York. While attending Commack High School, Sawhney competed in the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO), and participated in MIT PRIMES.[1] In 2016, for his research in graph theory through MIT PRIMES, he was named a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search[2] and won an award at the International Science and Engineering Fair.[3]

Sawhney attended the University of Pennsylvania for one year before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied mathematics and computer science.[1] He received an honorable mention in the Putnam Competition in 2016, 2018, and 2019.[1] In 2020, he was awarded a Churchill Scholarship for further study in mathematics at Cambridge University, after which he returned to MIT for doctoral studies. With his frequent collaborator Ashwin Sah, he received an honorable mention for the Morgan Prize for undergraduate research in 2020,[4] and won the Morgan Prize in 2021.[5] He completed his PhD in 2024, supervised by Yufei Zhao.[6]

Career

At MIT, Sawhney was noted for his productive collaboration with fellow student Ashwin Sah in the fields of combinatorics and number theory. Sah and Sawhney each attended MIT for undergraduate and doctoral studies between 2017 and 2024. During that time, they co-authored more than 50 papers,[7] on topics such as Ramsey theory,[8] Steiner systems,[9] subspace designs,[10] and Szemerédi's theorem.[7]

In 2024, Sawhney collaborated with Ben Green to prove that, for any n ≡ 0, 4 (mod 6), there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form p2 + nq2, where p and q are themselves constrained to be prime numbers. The case n = 4 resolved a conjecture made by John Friedlander and Henryk Iwaniec in 2018.[11]

Sawhney was awarded a Clay Research Fellowship in 2024,[6] and a Packard Fellowship in 2025.[12] He became a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University in 2024. He went on leave from Columbia in 2026 to join the artificial intelligence company OpenAI as a mathematician.[13]

In 2025, Sawhney and Mark Sellke used GPT-5, a large language model developed by OpenAI, to search the literature on several conjectures made by Paul Erdős in combinatorial number theory.[13][14] In 2026, Sawhney and Sellke used GPT-5 to find a counterexample to Erdős's conjecture on unit distance graphs.[15] GPT-5 provided a method to construct n points in the plane from which Ω(n1+ε) pairs of points are unit distance apart, for some ε > 0.[16] A team of mathematicians simplified the argument and computed an explicit lower bound for the exponent ε to be 6 × 10−38; Will Sawin subsequently improved the exponent to ε ≈ 0.014.[16] The construction is motivated by algebraic number theory, in particular the Golod–Shafarevich theorem, and involves high-dimensional lattices arising from CM-fields.[16] Timothy Gowers hailed the result as "a milestone in AI mathematics".[17]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Mongo, Julia (January 30, 2020). "Mehtaab Sawhney named 2020 Churchill Scholar". https://news.mit.edu/2020/mehtaab-sawhney-named-churchill-scholar-0130. 
  2. ↑ "Intel STS 2016 semifinalists". https://www.societyforscience.org/regeneron-sts/intel-sts-2016-semifinalists/. 
  3. ↑ "Intel ISEF 2016 Grand Award winners". May 13, 2016. https://www.societyforscience.org/press-release/intel-isef-2016-grand-award-winners/. 
  4. ↑ "Nina Zubrilina to receive the 2020 Morgan Prize". November 20, 2019. https://maa.org/news/nina-zubrilina-to-receive-the-2020-morgan-prize/. 
  5. ↑ "Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney receive 2021 Morgan Prize". October 29, 2020. https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6435. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Mehtaab Sawhney". July 1, 2024. https://www.claymath.org/people/mehtaab-sawhney/. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Sloman, Leila (August 5, 2024). "Grad students find inevitable patterns in big sets of numbers". Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/grad-students-find-inevitable-patterns-in-big-sets-of-numbers-20240805/. 
  8. ↑ Hartnett, Kevin (November 30, 2020). "Undergraduate math student pushes frontier of graph theory". Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/mit-undergraduate-math-student-pushes-frontier-of-graph-theory-20201130/. 
  9. ↑ Sloman, Leila (July 14, 2022). "Hypergraphs reveal solution to 50-year-old problem". Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/hypergraphs-reveal-solution-to-50-year-old-problem-20220714/. 
  10. ↑ Cepelewicz, Jordana (April 12, 2023). "Mathematicians find hidden structure in a common type of space". Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-find-hidden-structure-in-a-common-type-of-space-20230412/. 
  11. ↑ Howlett, Joseph (December 11, 2024). "Mathematicians uncover a new way to count prime numbers". Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-uncover-a-new-way-to-count-prime-numbers-20241211/. 
  12. ↑ "The David and Lucile Packard Foundation announces the 2025 Class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering". October 15, 2025. https://www.packard.org/insights/news/the-david-and-lucile-packard-foundation-announces-the-2025-class-of-packard-fellows-for-science-and-engineering/. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Howlett, Joseph (February 12, 2026). "Is AI on the precipice of revolutionizing math? It depends". Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-uncovers-solutions-to-erdos-problems-moving-closer-to-transforming-math/. 
  14. ↑ "Early experiments in accelerating science with GPT-5". November 20, 2025. https://openai.com/index/accelerating-science-gpt-5/. 
  15. ↑ Howlett, Joseph (May 21, 2026). "OpenAI announces AI's biggest math breakthrough yet". Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/. 
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Sawin, Will (May 20, 2026). "An explicit lower bound for the unit distance problem". arXiv:2605.20579 [math.CO].
  17. ↑ Milmo, Dan; Sample, Ian (May 21, 2026). "OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/21/openai-paul-erdos-maths-problem-breakthrough. 



Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Biography:Mehtaab_Sawhney&oldid=4407792"