Peter Sarnak

Peter Sarnak is the kind of mind that humbles me. Born in Johannesburg in 1953, trained at Stanford, he now holds a permanent chair at the Institute for Advanced Study and succeeded Andrew Wiles at Princeton, which alone tells you the altitude he operates at. The list of honors, the Wolf Prize, the Cole Prize, the Sylvester Medal, reads like a map of modern number theory. I cannot follow the mathematics, but I deeply value people who push the frontier of human knowledge in near silence, with no audience and no applause. The world advances because quiet geniuses like him keep working. I take my hat off entirely.

Name (English)

Peter Sarnak

Name (Japanese)

ピーター・サルナック

Reading

ぴーたー・さるなっく

Born

December 18, 1953 (age 72)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Snake

Origin

Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Occupation

mathematician / university teacher

University

Stanford University

Awards & achievements

• 2005 Cole Prize in Number Theory
• 2014 Wolf Prize in Mathematics
• 1998 George Pólya Prize
• 2001 Ostrowski Prize
• 2003 Levi L. Conant Prize
• 2018 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society
• 2014 honorary doctor of the Shandong University
• Sylvester Medal

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%94%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B5%E3%83%AB%E3%83%8A%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF

Tags

• Gauteng
• mathematician
• university teacher

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.