I was born in 1995 in India. My family moved to Australia when I was three months old and my hometown is Perth, Australia. My interest in mathematics was first sparked at the age of 5 during a six month visit to Germany. At the time, I could not speak German and thus to engage me in class, my teacher would give me mathematics exercise books to work through independently. Over the course of these six months, I worked through books up to 4 years above my grade level. In doing so, I discovered that I really loved doing mathematics at an early age.

My first exposure to advanced mathematics was at the age of 12 when I worked through “Principles of Mathematical Analysis” by Walter Rudin and “Topology” by James Munkres, and about a year later, “Algebra: A Graduate Course” by Martin Isaacs and “Real and Complex Analysis” by Walter Rudin. However, I did not simply read these books because I discovered the best way to learn mathematics was to treat the results in these books as exercises. Indeed, my fondest memories during this time are reading the statements of the theorems I was studying and proving them independently. The moments when I got the proof after lengthy periods of thinking were really quite special. I found that not only did my understanding of mathematics improve but so too did my enjoyment increase. I think it was these experiences that truly shaped my desire to become a research mathematician.

I accelerated through high school and at the age of 13, I was the youngest person in Australia to sit the university entrance exams (Tertiary Entrance Exams) in mathematics and physics. I enrolled in the Ph.B. degree at the Australian National University (ANU) when I was 15. The mathematics faculty at the ANU permitted me to take the most advanced mathematics courses available from the beginning of my degree. In my first semester, this included graduate level courses in algebraic number theory and finite group theory and in my second and third semesters, this included one year in each of algebraic geometry, harmonic analysis, and commutative algebra. (My undergraduate transcript and detailed descriptions of the courses are available as PDF files here.)

AmiteshDattaUndergraduateTranscript

AmiteshDattaUndergraduateCourses

I was also a tutor and grader in the mathematics department at the ANU in six different honours/PhD level mathematics courses (including algebraic number theory, algebraic curves, representation theory, and functional analysis). I tutored such courses from the beginning of the second year of my undergraduate degree. The job involved holding one hour tutorial sessions each week, where I taught supplementary material and worked through my own problems with the students. I also graded and helped students work through weekly problem sets. I tremendously enjoyed the discussions I had with the students in these classes and I learnt a lot through my interactions with them.

I moved to the USA to pursue a Ph.D. in pure mathematics at Princeton University in 2014 and I received my PhD in 2019. The information about my research, teaching and service at Princeton can be found in other tabs on the main menu.

In addition to mathematics, I am also extremely passionate about foreign languages. I have taught myself Spanish at an advanced level, Polish at an intermediate level, and can read the Cyrillic alphabet. I really love learning more about the idiosyncrasies of languages (especially the grammar) and comparing different languages in the same language family. My other hobbies include baking and my favourite foods to bake are parmigiana, cookies and cakes. I also enjoy regular strength training, especially pushups, pull-ups and overhead presses.