Richard Taylor (mathematician)

Template:Short description Template:Other people Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox scientist Richard Lawrence Taylor (born 19 May 1962) is a British-American<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> mathematician specialising in number theory.<ref>Template:Citation</ref> He is currently the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University in California.<ref name=":0">Taylor's staff page at Stanford.</ref>

Taylor received the 2002 Cole Prize, the 2007 Shaw Prize with Robert Langlands, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.

Career

He received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree from the Clare College of the University of Cambridge.<ref name="oxbgaz">SAVILIAN PROFESSORSHIP OF GEOMETRY in NOTICES, University Gazette 23.3.95 No. 4359 [1] Template:Webarchive</ref><ref name="WW" /> During his time at Cambridge, he was president of The Archimedeans in 1981 and 1982, following the resignation of his predecessor.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1988 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "On congruences between modular forms", under the supervision of Andrew Wiles.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

He was an assistant lecturer, lecturer, and then reader at the University of Cambridge from 1988 to 1995.<ref name="cv-2023">Template:Cite web</ref> From 1995 to 1996 he held the Savilian chair of geometry<ref name="oxbgaz" /> at the University of Oxford and Fellow of New College, Oxford.<ref name="cv-2023"/><ref name=WW>'TAYLOR, Prof. Richard Lawrence', Who's Who 2008, A & C Black, 2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007 accessed 27 March 2008</ref> He was a professor of mathematics at Harvard University from 1996 to 2012, at one point becoming the Herchel Smith Professor of Pure Mathematics.<ref name="cv-2023"/> He moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey as the Robert and Luisa Fernholz Professorship from 2012 to 2019.<ref name="cv-2023"/> He has been the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in Humanities & Sciences at Stanford University since 2018.<ref name=":0" />

Research

When a gap was found in the 1993 attempt by Andrew Wiles to prove the semistable case of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture for elliptic curves, Wiles asked Taylor to help him clarify what was required to complete the proof. Wiles eventually realized that work of Ehud de Shalit could be generalized to bypass the lacuna of 1993. Wiles and Taylor proved that a constructed Gorenstein ring that arose from this approach was also a complete intersection.<ref name=*TaylorWiles*>Template:Cite journal</ref> This ring theoretic result essentially completed the proof<ref name="Wiles1995">Template:Cite journal</ref> of the semistable case of Taniyama-Shimura, which Wiles expounded in the same issue of the Annals of Mathematics. This proof strategy has been dubbed "Taylor-Wiles patching".

In subsequent work, Taylor (along with Michael Harris) proved the local Langlands conjectures for GL(n) over a number field.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> A simpler proof was suggested almost at the same time by Guy Henniart,<ref>Template:Harvnb</ref> and ten years later by Peter Scholze.

Taylor, together with Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad and Fred Diamond, completed the proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture, by performing quite heavy technical computations in the case of additive reduction.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 2008, Taylor, following the ideas of Michael Harris and building on his joint work with Laurent Clozel, Michael Harris, and Nick Shepherd-Barron, announced a proof of the Sato–Tate conjecture, for elliptic curves with non-integral j-invariant. This partial proof of the Sato–Tate conjecture uses Wiles's theorem about modularity of semistable elliptic curves.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Awards and honors

He received the Whitehead Prize in 1990, the Fermat Prize and the Ostrowski Prize in 2001, the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 2002, and the Shaw Prize for Mathematics in 2007.<ref name="cv-2023"/> He received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics "for numerous breakthrough results in the theory of automorphic forms, including the Taniyama–Weil conjecture, the local Langlands conjecture for general linear groups, and the Sato–Tate conjecture."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995.<ref name="cv-2023"/> In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.<ref>List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 25 August 2013.</ref> In 2015 he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.<ref>National Academy of Sciences Member Directory. Retrieved 30 April 2016.</ref> He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Personal life

Taylor is the son of British physicist John C. Taylor. He is married and has two children.<ref name ="test">Template:Cite web</ref>

External links

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• Autobiography upon Shaw Prize acceptance