Princeton—the world’s foremost centre for pure mathematics and physics—the home to Einstein, Godel, and Turing, will be the next stop for this teenager, Sarthak, the most scholarly pupil of Indian mathematician Yaashaa Golovanov.
PUNE: Emerging from a humble background, with his father facing intermittent unemployment after Covid, Sarthak has reached an extraordinary milestone in the realm of pure mathematics. Under the rigorous guidance of his mentor Yaashaa Golovanov, he has secured a prestigious full scholarship valued at 3.2 crore to pursue his studies at Princeton University in the USA. This esteemed institution, alongside the renowned IAS, has been the academic haven for luminaries like Einstein, Gödel, and Alan Turing, making it the global epicenter for research in mathematics and theoretical physics.
As a dedicated member of AMMOC, an international math circle comprising students from fifteen countries, he has achieved an impressive total of 60 international medals and accolades. Approximately thirty of these were earned at top-tier international competitions held in the USA, Canada, and Australia. Under his guidance, the AMMOC team triumphed in several prestigious university-level contests, including PUMAC at Princeton, CMM at Caltech, BMT at UC Berkeley, and SMT at Stanford—four of the most esteemed competitions both in the USA and globally. In 2025, he also surpassed the cutoff for the USAMO with an outstanding score of 275.5. Following the paths of notable alumni like Konstantinos (now at UChicago), Tisya (now at Caltech), and Adelina (at the University of Toronto)—all distinguished students of mathematician Golovanov—Sarthak stands as the last of the original four students recruited by AMMOC during the 2020-21 academic year. Each of them has received full financial support at their respective universities and is currently pursuing studies in pure mathematics.
Sarthak recalls how, after failing to clear the Indian National Math Olympiad (INMO), he was so disappointed that despite preparing for three years under Yaashaa Golovanov, he could not make it to the INMO and IMO. His parents developed doubts about his mathematical abilities and career prospects in pure mathematics. If it was not for the extreme insistence from his mentor Yaashaa Golovanov, who took great personal risk and a leap to convince his parents to continue studying mathematics at AMMOC, this fundamentally remarkable day would never have seen the light of day—given that Sarthak’s parents were keen on withdrawing him from AMMOC and placing him in an IIT coaching academy. Given such circumstances, Sarthak and his family say that the mentor should always take the final call about the academic and professional trajectory of the child. Regardless of how good expert parents could be in their domain, they can never objectively determine the true potential in a child, which only a true mentor like Yaashaa Golovanov can determine. ‘We completely submitted the life of our child in the ablest hands of Yaashaa Golovanov, Sir,’ they added.
Post his UG in mathematics at Princeton, Sarthak wants to earn a doctorate in pure mathematics. This way he would continue to advance the boundary of human knowledge through his lifelong research and teachings in a world-leading research university.
Outside academics, Sarthak enjoys playing guitar, visiting mountains, and trekking. His favourite song track is Hans Zimmer’s ‘Time’ from Christopher Nolan’s movie, Inception. He says it resonates with the idea that ‘we do not understand mathematics; we just get used to it.’ He loves playing with cubes of various dimensions, and he finds it very fascinating because he sees a deep connection between solving a cube and abstract group theory. He has written handouts about this aspect.
Sarthak has been a great enabler of social justice. He has been a regular teacher of Euclidean geometry for girls in a tribal school. In addition to this, he has been online-teaching group theory, a very abstract subject of university mathematics, voluntarily to select students from central universities. Since 2023, he has been a regular problem-solving instructor at AMMOC and he says that he would like to continually mentor and teach students at AMMOC because without this programme, it would never have been possible for him to learn such advanced and structured mathematics at this age and eventually find a place at Princeton on a full scholarship. He derives deep joy in demonstrating the beauty of mathematics through his teaching.
Under his research direction and mentorship, Yaashaa Golovanov did remarkable research projects spanning over two hundred pages of dense mathematics. Because of this kind of rigorous training, he once spotted a mistake in a graduate-level textbook written by Tom W. Korner, a mathematician at the Cambridge University. Sarthak emailed this mistake to Prof. Korner, who acknowledged and appreciated the work of Sarthak and extended his wishes for his further studies in pure mathematics.
Sarthak’s modest parents—Dr. Dattatray Dhobale and Dr. Jayashree Dhobale, both employed in health insurance consultancy, felt very emotional seeing their child’s truly extraordinary success because, for the last four and a half years, they were not in a position to know what was happening in the academic life of their child. Their faith was shaken once when he failed in the INMO. However, for hours they listened to clear strategies of Yaashaa Golovanov, and they decided to support Sarthak and his mentor’s endeavour to cultivate Sarthak into a great mathematician. They feel very elated and humbled to witness this and express their infinite indebtedness and gratitude to director Yaashaa Golovanov.