Noam Elkies

American mathematician at Harvard, where at 26 he became the youngest professor ever given tenure, whose 1992 paper with Kuperberg, Larsen and Propp counted the domino tilings of the Aztec diamond, 2 to the power n(n + 1)/2 of them, and gave domino shuffling to choose one fairly.

Portrait: Renate Schmid, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)