Jennifer Shyamala Sayaka Balakrishnan is an American mathematician[1] known for leading a team that solved the problem of the "cursed curve", a Diophantine equation that was known for being "famously difficult".

[2] More generally, Balakrishnan specializes in algorithmic number theory and arithmetic geometry.

[4][5] As a junior at Harvest Christian Academy, Balakrishnan won an honorable mention in the 2001 Karl Menger Memorial Award competition, for the best mathematical project in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

[6] In the following year, she won the National High School Student Calculus Competition, given as part of the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad.

Her dissertation, Coleman integration for hyperelliptic curves: algorithms and applications, was supervised by Kiran Kedlaya.

[11][12][13] She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM).

[15] Computations by Galbraith (2002) and Baran (2014) had previously identified seven solutions on the cursed curve (six corresponding to elliptic curves with complex multiplication, and one cusp), but their computational methods were unable to show that the list of solutions was complete.

[2] This work was initially reported in a 2017 arXiv preprint [18] and was published in the journal Annals of Mathematics in 2019.

[19] Balakrishnan has researched, with Ken Ono and others, Lehmer's question on whether the Ramanujan tau function