comm-morgan.qxp 10/20/96 4:39 PM Page 1530

1996 AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize

The 1996 AMS-MAA-SIAM tions from Zn to Zm”, which has been accepted Frank and Brennie Morgan for publication in Discrete Mathematics. This re- Prize for Outstanding Re- search ultimately led to his thesis, “On P-or- search in Mathematics by an derings and polynomial functions on arbitrary Undergraduate Student was subsets of Dedekind-type rings”, which unifies presented to Manjul Bhar- and generalizes the results of about twenty pre- gava. The prize was pre- vious papers, many by well-known mathemati- sented during the Seattle cians. In addition, Bhargava has settled several Mathfest in August. long-standing conjectures in the theory of poly- Lenhard L. Ng was named nomial functions on various types of rings. Honorable Mention. Both His paper “Generalizing the factorial func- Bhargava and Ng were un- tions: Sequence of ideals associated with a sub- dergraduates at Harvard set of an algebraic field”, submitted to the Jour- Manjul Bhargava and finished their degrees nal of Number Theory, contains a generalization there this year. of the factorial function and work on fixed di- visors. Under the supervision of Gallian, Bhar- The Morgan Prize Committee consists of Kelly gava also has resolved a conjecture, gives sig- Black, Don Chakerian, Frank Morgan, Martha nificant new results, and unifies and generalizes Siegel (chair), John Ryff, and Lee Zia. Their cita- all previous results in mistilings with rectangu- tion for Bhargava follows. lar tiles in his “Mistilings of the plane with rec- Manjul Bhargava was an undergraduate at tangles”, submitted recently to Discrete Math- Harvard University when he wrote the four pa- ematics. pers that were submitted to the Morgan Prize The many letters the committee received from Committee. His Senior Honors Thesis, written his mentors, as well as from other mathemati- under the direction of Barry Mazur, was sug- cians whose work he has generalized, reinforced gested to Bhargava by Joseph Gallian at a sum- our judgment that Bhargava has done truly out- mer REU. Bhargava completely solved the prob- standing mathematical research, and we are lem posed in the summer of 1995 in his paper pleased to award him the 1996 Morgan Prize. “Congruence preservation and polynomial func-

1530 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 43, NUMBER 12