Stony Brook University’s Institute for Creative Problem Solving will host Fields Medalist Manjul Bhargava for a lecture, “Magic Squares, Cubes and Hypercubes — From Ancient Origins to Recent Advances,” on Saturday, September 26.
The event — free and open to the public — is part of the Convergence lecture series and is taking place during CommUniversity Day at Stony Brook. It will be held at noon at the Student Activities Center Ballroom A.
Inscribed near the entrance of the Parshvanath Jain Temple in Khajuraho, India, built around 960 CE, is a 4×4 grid of numbers. Every row adds up to 34. So does every column, every diagonal, each of the four quadrants and the four corners — and that’s only the start of it.
Bhargava, the Brandon Fradd and Robert Gunning Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, will explain why this particular square is unlike any other ever found, settling a question the geometer H.S.M. Coxeter raised in 1938. He’ll also show what happens when you take the idea past two dimensions: there’s exactly one such object in every dimension, cubes and hypercubes included.
A Long Island native, Bhargava is internationally recognized as one of the foremost mathematicians of our time and one of the world’s leading experts in number theory. He earned the Fields Medal in 2014 — widely considered the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics” — for revolutionizing how we understand numbers.
Bhargava also serves as president of the National Museum of Mathematics in New York and was a primary writer of India’s landmark 2020 National Education Policy. Also an accomplished classical tabla player, he is famous for weaving music, magic and poetry into his math, making complex ideas accessible and captivating for audiences worldwide.
The Convergence lecture series explores the wide world of mathematical thinking. Each talk offers a fresh perspective — whether it’s diving into real-world applications, unpacking abstract concepts or just having fun with fascinating patterns, puzzles and problems. You don’t need to be a math expert, just come ready to think, laugh and learn.
The series is offered by the Institute for Creative Problem Solving in collaboration with the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
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