Andrew Richard Booker (born 1976)
is a British
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
who is currently Professor of Pure Mathematics at the
University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a Red brick university, red brick Russell Group research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Society of Merchant Venturers, Merchant Venturers' sc ...
. He is an
analytic number theorist known for his work on
L-functions
In mathematics, an ''L''-function is a meromorphic function on the complex plane, associated to one out of several categories of mathematical objects. An ''L''-series is a Dirichlet series, usually convergent on a half-plane, that may give ...
of
automorphic forms
In harmonic analysis and number theory, an automorphic form is a well-behaved function from a topological group ''G'' to the complex numbers (or complex vector space) which is invariant under the action of a discrete subgroup \Gamma \subset G of ...
and his contributions to the
sums of three cubes
In the mathematics of sums of powers, it is an open problem to characterize the numbers that can be expressed as a sum of three cubes of integers, allowing both positive and negative cubes in the sum. A necessary condition for n to equal such a s ...
problem.
Education
Booker graduated from the
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with College admission ...
in 1998, earning the E.J. McShane Prize as the top undergraduate in mathematics. He completed his doctoral degree at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...
in 2003, under the supervision of
Peter Sarnak
Peter Clive Sarnak (born 18 December 1953) is a South African-born mathematician with dual South-African and American nationalities. Sarnak has been a member of the permanent faculty of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced St ...
.
Contributions
In the spring of 2019 Booker gained international attention by showing that 33 can be expressed as the sum of three cubes. At that time 33 and 42 were the only numbers less than 100 for which this problem was open. Later that year, in joint work with
Andrew Sutherland of
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
, he settled the case of 42, as well as answering a 65-year-old question of
Mordell by finding a third representation for 3 as the sum of three cubes.
Popular Mechanics
''Popular Mechanics'' (sometimes PM or PopMech) is a magazine of popular science and technology, featuring automotive, home, outdoor, electronics, science, do-it-yourself, and technology topics. Military topics, aviation and transportation o ...
cited the result for 42 as one of the top two mathematical breakthroughs of 2019.
Video appearances
Numberphile
''Numberphile'' is an educational YouTube channel featuring videos that explore topics from a variety of fields of mathematics. In the early days of the channel, each video focused on a specific number, but the channel has since expanded its s ...
has produced three
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...
videos related to sums of three cubes in which Andrew Booker is the featured guest:
42 is the new 33The Mystery of 42 is Solved3 as a sum of 3 cubes
As of April, 2021 these videos had accumulated a total of almost two million views.
Selected publications
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*
*
References
External links
at the University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a Red brick university, red brick Russell Group research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Society of Merchant Venturers, Merchant Venturers' sc ...
Andrew Booker's profile
on MathSciNet
MathSciNet is a searchable online bibliographic database created by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. It contains all of the contents of the journal '' Mathematical Reviews'' (MR) since 1940 along with an extensive author database, links ...
Andrew Booker's profile
on zbMath
zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructur ...
Andrew Booker's profile
on Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...
Andrew Booker's preprints
posted to arXiv
arXiv (pronounced " archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists o ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Booker, Andrew
Living people
21st-century British mathematicians
Number theorists
Princeton University alumni
University of Virginia alumni
Academics of the University of Bristol
1976 births