Mohan Ganesalingam
Mohan Ganesalingam is a British Tamil mathematician and the Co-founder and Chief Research Officer of what3words, the London-based location technology company that has divided the entire world into a grid of 57 trillion 3-by-3-metre squares, each assigned a unique combination of three words. He achieved the top first in the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos — known as the Senior Wrangler — in 2001, before indulging his passion for languages with an MA in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, winning a university prize for the best results in the Cambridge English Faculty. He went on to complete a PhD on the language of mathematics, earning the Europe-wide E. W. Beth Prize for outstanding dissertations in Logic, Language, and Information, and spent six years as a Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge studying language and cognition.
Ganesalingam co-designed the what3words addressing system and wrote the AutoSuggest algorithm that underlies it — the core technological innovation that makes the system both globally scalable and practically usable. He co-founded what3words in 2013 alongside Chris Sheldrick, Jack Waley-Cohen, and Michael Dent, bringing his deep expertise in mathematics, linguistics, and algorithms to the challenge of building a universal, language-agnostic addressing standard. The system was specifically designed to avoid homophones, prioritise memorability, and be optimised for voice input, making it as useful spoken aloud as typed.
Today, what3words is used by over 85% of UK emergency services, integrated into navigation systems by manufacturers including Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover, and Tata Motors, and has raised over £100 million from investors including Intel Capital, Deutsche Bahn, and Sony Innovation Fund. The platform is available in over 60 languages and has been downloaded more than 30 million times globally. Ganesalingam continues to lead research at what3words, ensuring the technical foundations of the world's most precise addressing system remain robust as the company expands across logistics, automotive, and e-commerce.
