Michael Artin

Michael Artin
Michael Artin (photo by George Bergman)
Born	28 June 1934 Hamburg, Germany
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	MIT
Alma mater	Harvard University Princeton University
Thesis	On Enriques' Surfaces (1960)
Doctoral advisor	Oscar Zariski
Doctoral students	Eric Friedlander David Harbater Rick Miranda Zinovy Reichstein Amnon Yekutieli Jian James Zhang
Notable awards	Harvard Centennial Medal (2005) Steele Prize (2002) Wolf Prize (2013) National Medal of Science (2015)

Michael Artin (German: [ˈaɐ̯tiːn]; born 28 June 1934) is an American mathematician and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematics department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry.^[1][2]

Life and career

Artin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana. His parents were Natalia Naumovna Jasny (Natascha) and Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20th century. Artin's parents had left Germany in 1937, because Michael Artin's maternal grandfather was Jewish.^[3]

Artin did his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, receiving an A.B. in 1955; he then moved to Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of Oscar Zariski, defending a thesis about Enriques surfaces.^[1][4]

In the early 1960s Artin spent time at the IHÉS in France, contributing to the SGA4 volumes of the Séminaire de géométrie algébrique, on topos theory and étale cohomology. His work on the problem of characterising the representable functors in the category of schemes has led to the Artin approximation theorem, in local algebra. This work also gave rise to the ideas of an algebraic space and algebraic stack, and has proved very influential in moduli theory. Additionally, he has made contributions to the deformation theory of algebraic varieties. He began to turn his interest from algebraic geometry to noncommutative algebra (noncommutative ring theory), especially geometric aspects, after a talk by Shimshon Amitsur and an encounter in Chicago with Claudio Procesi and Lance W. Small, "which prompted [his] first foray into ring theory".^[5]

In 2002, Artin won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 2005, he was awarded the Harvard Centennial Medal. In 2013 he won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969),^[6] the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics,^[1] and the American Mathematical Society.^[7]

See also

• Artin–Mazur zeta function
• Artin stacks
• Artin–Verdier duality

References

1. Faculty profile, MIT mathematics department, retrieved 2011-01-03
2. Date information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities linked authority file (LAF) .
3. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Michael Artin", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
4. Michael Artin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
5. From the MacTutor biography: "His main research area changed from algebraic geometry to noncommutative ring theory".
6. "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 25 April 2011.
7. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2012-11-03.

External links

• Michael Artin at MIT Mathematics