Jennifer Balakrishnan, a young mathematician who is known for her research in the field of number theory and who joined BU’s College of Arts & Sciences faculty in September 2016, has been awarded a prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professorship in the CAS department of mathematics and statistics for 2016–2022. Clare Booth Luce professorships, which are given by the Henry Luce Foundation, support women in mathematics, science, and engineering.

“We are extremely pleased that the Clare Booth Luce Foundation will be supporting our outstanding new colleague,” says Tasso Kaper, a CAS professor of mathematics and chair of the department. “The foundation has a long tradition of supporting the transformative research of female professors in many STEM disciplines. Professor Balakrishnan is a leading mathematician performing cutting-edge research in number theory, arithmetic, geometry, and computational number theory.”

“I am delighted and honored to receive this support and I am excited by its potential to expand my research program in number theory,” says Balakrishnan. “I plan to use the funding to advance undergraduate and graduate research at Boston University, and I especially hope to encourage women to pursue opportunities in mathematics.”

The award is given in recognition of Balakrishnan’s research, as well as her record in supporting young women in mathematics and number theory. Kaper notes that Balakrishnan earned a reputation as “a stellar mentor” for graduate and undergraduate students during the past three years as the Titchmarsh Research Fellow in mathematics at Oxford University, in the United Kingdom.

Modern number theory, says Kaper, is the study of the properties of prime numbers and rational numbers, which are the numbers derived from dividing one integer by another, such as 2/3. The field is connected to most other topics in mathematics and statistics—like analysis, combinatorics, differential equations, arithmetic geometry, logic, probability, and topology— and also plays a central role in many other disciplines, including computer science, physics, and chemistry, says Kaper. Number theory, he adds, “provides the basis of many state-of-the-art cryptography and data encryption methods, without which modern banking, commercial transactions, digital signatures, secure communication, and e-commerce could not function effectively.”

In addition to her fundamental theoretical research in the field, Kaper says, “Professor Balakrishnan is an internationally recognized leader in developing the SAGE open software for computations in number theory and she has developed state-of-the-art methods for performing exact calculations for elliptic curves, which lie at the heart of modern methods in cryptography.”