Ezra Abraham "Bud" Brown (born January 22, 1944, in Reading, Pennsylvania) is an American mathematician active in combinatorics, algebraic number theory, elliptic curves, graph theory, expository mathematics and cryptography. He spent most of his career at Virginia Tech where he is now Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics. [1]
Brown earned a BA at Rice University in 1965. [2] He then studied mathematics at Louisiana State University (LSU), getting an MS in 1967 and a PhD in 1969 with the dissertation "Representations of Discriminantal Divisors by Binary Quadratic Forms" under Gordon Pall. [3] He joined Virginia Tech in 1969 becoming Assistant Professor (1969–73), Associate Professor (1973–81), Professor (1981–2005), and Alumni Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics (2005–2017). He retired from Virginia Tech in 2017. [4] [5] [1]
Brown became interested in elliptic curves while at LSU and this has remained one of his principal areas of research along with quadratic forms and algebraic number theory in general.
His extensive expository writing has garnered him many awards from the MAA, including the Chauvenet Prize, the Allendoerfer Award (3 times) and the Pólya Award (3 times).
His books include The Unity of Combinatorics (MAA, 2020), co-authored with Richard K. Guy. [6]
While at LSU he met his future wife Jo. Brown remained at Virginia Tech until his retirement in 2017.
At the age of 16 Brown taught himself to play the piano, and in college he acted in several musicals and joined an a cappella chorus. In 1989, he joined the Blacksburg Master Chorale and the chorus of Opera Roanoke. Starting in 2011 he took his love of music and math to MathFest where he an his fellow mathematicians composed new words to old show tunes and even took part in a Gilbert-and-Sullivan Singalong at MathFest 2016 with his "Biscuits of Number Theory" co-editor Art Benjamin. [7]
Brown and his mathematical grandfather, L. E. Dickson, have the same birthday. [8]
Sir Andrew John Wiles is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
George Pólya was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education. He has been described as one of The Martians, an informal category which included one of his most famous students at ETH Zurich, John von Neumann.
The modularity theorem states that elliptic curves over the field of rational numbers are related to modular forms in a particular way. Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor proved the modularity theorem for semistable elliptic curves, which was enough to imply Fermat's Last Theorem. Later, a series of papers by Wiles's former students Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond and Richard Taylor, culminating in a joint paper with Christophe Breuil, extended Wiles's techniques to prove the full modularity theorem in 2001.
The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians; computer scientists; statisticians; and many others in academia, government, business, and industry.
Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
In mathematics, complex multiplication (CM) is the theory of elliptic curves E that have an endomorphism ring larger than the integers. Put another way, it contains the theory of elliptic functions with extra symmetries, such as are visible when the period lattice is the Gaussian integer lattice or Eisenstein integer lattice.
Joseph Hillel Silverman is a professor of mathematics at Brown University working in arithmetic geometry, arithmetic dynamics, and cryptography.
In mathematics, a character sum is a sum of values of a Dirichlet character χ moduloN, taken over a given range of values of n. Such sums are basic in a number of questions, for example in the distribution of quadratic residues, and in particular in the classical question of finding an upper bound for the least quadratic non-residue moduloN. Character sums are often closely linked to exponential sums by the Gauss sums.
Ian Grant Macdonald was a British mathematician known for his contributions to symmetric functions, special functions, Lie algebra theory and other aspects of algebra, algebraic combinatorics, and combinatorics.
Carl Barnett Allendoerfer was an American mathematician in the mid-twentieth century, known for his work in topology and mathematics education.
Manjul Bhargava is a Canadian-American mathematician. He is the Brandon Fradd, Class of 1983, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, the Stieltjes Professor of Number Theory at Leiden University, and also holds Adjunct Professorships at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and the University of Hyderabad. He is known primarily for his contributions to number theory.
Dwijendra Kumar Ray-Chaudhuri is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He and his student R. M. Wilson together solved Kirkman's schoolgirl problem in 1968 which contributed to developments in design theory.
Joseph A. Gallian is an American mathematician, the Morse Alumni Distinguished University Professor of Teaching in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. The cases n = 1 and n = 2 have been known since antiquity to have infinitely many solutions.
Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is a proof by British mathematician Andrew Wiles of a special case of the modularity theorem for elliptic curves. Together with Ribet's theorem, it provides a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem. Both Fermat's Last Theorem and the modularity theorem were believed to be impossible to prove using previous knowledge by almost all living mathematicians at the time.
Barry Charles Mazur is an American mathematician and the Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University. His contributions to mathematics include his contributions to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, Mazur's torsion theorem in arithmetic geometry, the Mazur swindle in geometric topology, and the Mazur manifold in differential topology.
Ross Honsberger (1929–2016) was a Canadian mathematician and author on recreational mathematics.
Israel Kleiner is a Canadian mathematician and historian of mathematics.
Edray Herber Goins is an American mathematician. He specializes in number theory and algebraic geometry. His interests include Selmer groups for elliptic curves using class groups of number fields, Belyi maps and Dessin d'enfants.