Jennifer Balakrishnan

Jennifer Shyamala Sayaka Balakrishnan is an American mathematician known for leading a team that solved the problem of the "cursed curve", a Diophantine equation that was "famously difficult" before their solution. More generally Balakrishnan specializes in algorithmic number theory and arithmetic geometry. She is a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor at Boston University, and a Sloan Research Fellow.
Education and career.
Balakrishnan was born in Mangilao, Guam to Narayana and Shizuko Balakrishnan; her father is a professor of chemistry at the University of Guam.
As a junior at Harvest Christian Academy, Balakrishnan won an honorable mention in the 2001 Karl Menger Memorial Award competition, for the best mathematical project in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Her project concerned elliptic coordinate systems. In the following year, she won the National High School Student Calculus Competition, given as part of the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad.
Balakrishnan graduated from Harvard University in 2006, with both a "magna cum laude" bachelor's degree and a master's degree in mathematics. She moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for her doctoral studies, completing her Ph.D. in 2011. Her dissertation, "Coleman integration for hyperelliptic curves: algorithms and applications", was supervised by Kiran Kedlaya.
She returned to Harvard for postdoctoral studies from 2011 to 2013, and then moved to the University of Oxford from 2013 to 2016, where she was a Junior Research Fellow in Balliol College and a Titchmarsh Research Fellow in the Mathematical Institute. She became Clare Booth Luce Assistant Professor at Boston University in 2016.
Balakrishnan is one of the principal investigators in the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, a large multi-university collaboration involving Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Brown University, and Dartmouth College, with additional collaborators from other universities in the US, England, Australia, the Netherlands, and Canada.. She also serves on the board of directors of the Number Theory Foundation and the editorial board of Research in Number Theory.
Contributions.
In 2017, Balakrishnan led a team of mathematicians in solving the "cursed curve" formula_1. This curve is modeled by the equation
and, as a Diophantine equation, the problem is to identify all the combinations of rational numbers for the variables formula_3, formula_4, and formula_5 for which the equation is true. Although as an explicit equation this curve has a complicated form, it is significant in the theory of elliptic curves, as a modular curve whose solutions characterize the one remaining unsolved case of a theorem of on the Galois representations of elliptic curves without complex multiplication.
Computations by and had previously identified seven solutions to the cursed curve (six corresponding to elliptic curves with complex multiplication, and one cusp), but their computational methods were unable to show that the list of solutions was complete. Following a suggestion of Oxford mathematician Minhyong Kim, Balakrishnan and her co-authors constructed a "Selmer variety" associated with the curve, such that the rational points of the curve all lie on the Selmer variety as well, and such that the number of points of intersection of the curve and the variety can be computed. Using this method, they proved that the seven known solutions to the cursed curve are the only ones possible.. This work was initially reported in 2017 arXiv preprint and was published in the "Annals of Mathematics" in 2019.
As well as for her work in number theory, Balakrishnan is known for her work implementing number-theoretical algorithms as part of the SageMath computer algebra system.
Recognition.
In 2018, Balakrishnan was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow. In 2020, she was selected for a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
She received the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professorship in 2016.