There are many ways in which one can win (or earn) $ 1 million. Most are difficult for whatever reason. Professor Ken Ono of the UW-Madison Mathematics Department presented a Mathematics Problem which could win you that amount. The problem, the Birch Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is one of the Millenium Prize Problems of the Clay Mathematics Institute. Professor Ono disscussed the origin of the Birch Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, gave its precise statement, and indicated the difficulties in formulating a solution.
 

Professor Ono obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1993. From 1995 to 1997 he was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He has held joint positions at both Penn State and the UW- Madison and is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In a ceremony at the White House in April 2000, Professor Ono was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) - the highest honor bestowed by the US government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. In addition, he has mentored several top three finishers in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and the Intel Science Talent Search and has received the NSF Early Career Award, Alfred Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and the Lucille Packard Foundation Research Fellowship.

In a recent article in Science News Professor Ono's research on partition congruences was described as follows:

"Ono's work is really spectacular. "This certainly must rank as the most important work on partition congruences since the epic work of Ramanujan."  Bruce C. Berndt of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"It's an extraordinary discovery. It has opened up new avenues for studying some of the most important, but difficult, questions in number theory." Andrew M. Granville of the University of Georgia in Athens.

Professor Ono's partition research has intriguing, unexpected links to complex mathematical ideas and methods that earlier led to proofs of Fermat's last theorem and the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture
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