A Romanian at Stanford: Sole Person with Three Perfect Math Papers

Ciprian Manolescu from Romania is recognized as the sole individual to have authored three flawless papers at the International Mathematical Olympiad, the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest posted on Facebook.

“Ciprian Manolescu is a Romanian-American mathematician, currently a professor of mathematics specializing in geometry and topology at Stanford University in California. He is the only person to have written three perfect papers at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He completed his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Harvard University. In 2019, he won the prestigious “E.H. Moore” prize awarded by the American Mathematical Society for outstanding research published in one of the society’s main publications,” reads the post.

According to his own presentation, Manolescu’s research interests include gauge theory, low-dimensional topology, and symplectic geometry. He worked on topics such as the Seiberg-Witten equations, Heegaard Floer theory, and Khovanov homology.

Manolescu got his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2004, supervised by Peter Kronheimer. After that, he was a Clay Research Fellow, a postdoc at Princeton, and on the faculty at Columbia and UCLA, before coming to Stanford in 2019.