Person: Mazur (2), Barry
Barry Mazur is an American mathematician who made contributions to geometric topology, differential topology and algebraic geometry.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- A friend, who was somewhat older than Mazur, was interested in electronics and this sparked an interest in Mazur in the mathematics which was behind the physical phenomena that fascinated his friend.
- Mazur did participate in the programme but he did not enjoy it and this was evident in his performance.
- Fortunately Princeton was satisfied with evidence of mathematical ability rather than requiring a degree certificate which Mazur never received, so he was able to enter the graduate school at Princeton University.
- While a Junior Fellow, Mazur met Grace Dane who was a postgraduate research biologist at Harvard studying the microarchitecture of silkworms.
- Mazur received four prizes from the American Mathematical Society, namely the Veblen Prize for geometry in 1966, the Cole Prize for number theory in 1982, the Chauvenet Prize for exposition in 1994, and the Steele Prize for seminal contribution to research in 2000.
- Mazur began his research career in geometric topology but has become one of the world's leading experts in number theory after working in algebraic geometry.
- Mazur's work in topology was outstanding and it led to the award of the Veblen Prize in 1966 for his work on the generalized Schönflies theorem.
- Rarely has a single paper given rise to such a wealth of important mathematics as has Mazur's paper on "Modular curves and the Eisenstein ideal".
- Mazur had much earlier received the Cole prize for work which would prove important in the solution of Fermat's last Theorem.
- Let us quote a beautiful description of 'number' which Mazur wrote in the Foreword to Tobias Dantzig's book Number: The Language of Science.
- Mazur gives his views in poetic fashion in Number Theory as Gadfly.
- Another honour given to Mazur which we have not mentioned above was his election as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1982.
- Mazur has written several research books such as Étale homotopy with Mike Artin in 1969, Smoothings of piecewise linear manifolds with Morris Hirsch in 1974, and Arithmetic moduli of elliptic curves with Nicholas Katz in 1985.
Born 19 December 1937, New York, New York, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa, Topology
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
