Jordan Ellenberg

Ellenberg grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, the child of two statisticians; he recalls that local teacher Eric Walstein sought out mathematically advanced children for one-on-one work and that he may have been the first student Walstein worked with.⁠[1]

He represented the United States three times at the International Mathematical Olympiad, winning two gold medals and a silver; he attended HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, earned a master’s degree in fiction writing at Johns Hopkins, returned to Harvard for his PhD in mathematics and was then a postdoc at PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry.⁠[2]

He graduated from Harvard University in 1993 and wrote his later-published novel at Johns Hopkins; in 1994 he returned to Harvard for doctoral work under Barry Mazur.⁠[3]

He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1998 with the thesis “Hilbert modular forms and the Galois representations attached to Hilbert–Blumenthal Abelian varieties.”⁠[4]

In 2001 he began writing the column “Do the Math” for SlateSlate AutoSlate Auto is a U.S. electric vehicle company established in 2022 that is developing a customizable all-electric pickup with a starting price of $24,950, to be assembled in Indiana.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

The column has covered number-related topics such as Nate Silver’s applied probability and Stephen Colbert’s mathematical limitations.⁠[5]

In 2003 Coffee House Press published his novel The Grasshopper King.⁠[6]

The novel follows a department at Chandler State University devoted to an obscure European country’s language and poet, where a celebrated professor abruptly stops talking and a student is assigned to watch him.⁠[7]

With Akshay Venkatesh and Craig Westerland he proved a homological stabilization theorem for Hurwitz spaces, moduli spaces of branched covers of the complex projective line, with the consequence that for q large enough a positive fraction of quadratic extensions of Fq(t) have the ℓ-part of their class group isomorphic to a given finite abelian ℓ-group.⁠[8]

On December 5, 2012, the three submitted a sequel to arXiv completing the proof of a version of the Cohen–Lenstra conjecture over function fields.⁠[9]

On June 3, 2014, Penguin Press published his How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking; Kirkus Reviews called it witty and expansive, saying it argues that math is an extension of common sense and uses real-world anecdotes to show how simple math aids decisions.⁠[10]

The book became a New York Times and Sunday Times (UK) bestseller.⁠[11]

When the book came out he was Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at UW–Madison and had recently been named to the inaugural class of American Mathematical Society Fellows; he said, “Some of us have to be out in front of people, saying why math is important.”⁠[12]

In April 2015, then John D. MacArthur Professor and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, planning to continue research on the deep connections between numbers and geometry and to explore the geometry of data with colleagues at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.⁠[13]

On May 30, 2016, he and Dion Gijswijt submitted a paper to arXiv using the method of Croot, Lev and Pach to bound subsets of F_q^n with no three-term arithmetic progression by c^n with c < q, sharply improving the earlier Bateman–Katz bound for the cap set problem.⁠[14]

Before that, the two had independently posted three-page proofs within ten days; Ellenberg called the cascade “math at Internet speed” and said, “It makes you wonder what else is actually easy.”⁠[15]

Having written in the Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry about mathematically advanced children, he was consulted by the producers of the film Gifted and appears briefly at the end writing on a board.⁠[1]

In October 2017 he published the New York Times op-ed “How Computers Turned Gerrymandering Into a Science,” noting that Wisconsin has about as many Democrats as Republicans while Republicans held 65 percent of State Assembly seats.⁠[16]

That October he co-organized a conference on the geometry of redistricting in Madison; he sees a high efficiency gap as a “red flag” but does not see the test as a basis for a constitutional standard for courts.⁠[17]

In 2019 he and ten other mathematicians signed a gerrymandering brief to the U.S. Supreme Court proposing to compare real maps with random maps sampled by a Markov chain random walk; he said the court did not end up invoking the argument.⁠[3]

In 2021 he published Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, StrategyStrategyStrategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is a Nasdaq-listed company (ticker MSTR) headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia, United States, founded in 1989 by Michael Saylor and originally built on enterprise analytics software. Since 2020, the company has used bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset and describes itself as the world’s first and largest Bitcoin Treasury Company; as of September 27, 2026, it held 847,666 bitcoins. Its current Chief Executive Officer is Phong Le.Open the full entry, Democracy, and Everything Else; New York Times reviewer Parul Sehgal called him “rather spectacular” at analyzing the mathematical foundations of what we do and how we think.⁠[18]

A Physics World review described the book as moving from Euclid and topology puzzles such as how many holes a straw has to random walks, Markov chains, artificial intelligence, the geometry of pandemics and gerrymandering, finding some historical passages too detailed but the author an entertaining guide.⁠[19]

Alongside the book’s release he published an article in The Atlantic on pandemic risk assessments, arguing that decisions are not based only on statistics or official advice but come down to personal choice.⁠[20]

He appeared on episode 190 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls him a mathematician and the author of Shape and How Not to Be Wrong; topics included geometry, symmetry, topology, higher dimensions, Fermat’s Last Theorem, prime numbers, Conway’s Game of Life, group theory, gauge theory, and Perelman and the Poincaré conjecture.⁠[21]

In December 2023 Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry announced FunSearch, which uses large language models to generate programs that find new solutions to mathematical problems; working with Ellenberg on the cap set problem, it found the largest cap sets yet known in some settings, and Ellenberg said of its outputs, “When I study them, I learn something.”⁠[22]

On November 1, 2024, he, François Charton, Adam Zsolt Wagner and Geordie Williamson submitted PatternBoost to arXiv, a method that alternates classical local search with training a transformer neural network on the best constructions to find interesting constructions in mathematics, including extremal combinatorics.⁠[23]

In March 2025 Aaron Landesman and Ishan Levy posted a paper to arXiv showing that the homology of Hurwitz spaces attached to any finite rack stabilizes integrally, proving a conjecture of Ellenberg, Venkatesh and Westerland.⁠[24]

On April 22, 2026, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences announced its new members, and he was one of five UW–Madison professors elected; the university noted his contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry and arithmetic geometry and his ability to make complex mathematics accessible to broad audiences.⁠[25]

As of October 2026 he is John D. MacArthur Professor and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with interests including rational points on varieties, counting number fields and applications of machine learning to pure mathematics; he is a co-PI on the new “Mathematics & AI Synergies” research training group, and his new book Don’t Be Too Sure is scheduled for May 2027.⁠[6]

He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Tanya Schlam, and their two children.⁠[2]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.jordanellenberg.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/JSEllenberg (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

University of Wisconsin–Madison: Official website: https://www.wisc.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[25]