Bhargava was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in a Hindu family to immigrant parents from India and he grew up primarily in Long Island, New York. His mother Mira Bhargava, a Mathematician at Hofstra University, was his first mathematics Teacher. He completed all of his high school math and computer science courses by age 14. He attended Plainedge High School in North Massapequa, and graduated in 1992 as the class valedictorian. He obtained his B.A. from Harvard University in 1996. For his research as an undergraduate, he was awarded the 1996 Morgan Prize. Bhargava went on to receive his doctorate from Princeton in 2001, supervised by Andrew Wiles and funded by a Hertz Fellowship. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2001-02, and at Harvard University in 2002-03. Princeton appointed him as a tenured Full Professor in 2003. He was appointed to the Stieltjes Chair in Leiden University in 2010.