Roger Heath-Brown | |
---|---|
Born | 12 October 1952 |
Citizenship | United Kingdom |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Known for | Analytic number theory, Heath-Brown–Moroz constant |
Awards | Smith's Prize (1976) Berwick Prize (1981) Fellow of the Royal Society (1993) Senior Berwick Prize (1996) Pólya Prize (2009) Sylvester Medal (2022) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Pure mathematics |
Institutions | University of Oxford |
Thesis | Topics in Analytic Number Theory (1979) |
Doctoral advisor | Alan Baker |
Doctoral students | Timothy Browning James Maynard |
Website | www |
David Rodney "Roger" Heath-Brown OBE FRS (born 12 October 1952 [1] ) is a British mathematician working in the field of analytic number theory. [2]
He was an undergraduate and graduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge; his research supervisor was Alan Baker. [3] [4]
In 1979 he moved to the University of Oxford, where from 1999 he held a professorship in pure mathematics. [1] He retired in 2016. [5]
Heath-Brown is known for many striking results. He proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form x3 + 2y3. [6] In collaboration with S. J. Patterson in 1978 he proved the Kummer conjecture on cubic Gauss sums in its equidistribution form. He has applied Burgess's method on character sums to the ranks of elliptic curves in families. He proved that every non-singular cubic form over the rational numbers in at least ten variables represents 0. [7] Heath-Brown also showed that Linnik's constant is less than or equal to 5.5. [8] More recently, Heath-Brown is known for his pioneering work on the so-called determinant method. Using this method he was able to prove a conjecture of Serre [9] in the four variable case in 2002. [10] This particular conjecture of Serre was later dubbed the "dimension growth conjecture" and this was almost completely solved by various works of Browning, Heath-Brown, and Salberger by 2009. [11]
The London Mathematical Society has awarded Heath-Brown the Junior Berwick Prize (1981), the Senior Berwick Prize (1996), [12] and the Pólya Prize (2009). He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1993, [1] and a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in 1999. [13]
He was an invited speaker at International Congress of Mathematicians in 1983 in Warsaw and in 2010 in Hyderabad on the topic of "Number Theory." [14]
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [15] In 2022 the Royal Society awarded him the Sylvester Medal "for his many important contributions to the study of prime numbers and solutions to equations in integers". [16]
Heath-Brown was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to mathematics and mathematical research. [17]
In September 2007, he co-authored (along with Joseph H. Silverman) the preface to the Oxford University Sixth Edition of the classic text An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers by G.H. Hardy and E.M. Wright.
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 by the Royal Society. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and in 2018, was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
John Horton Conway was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
Godfrey Harold Hardy was an English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis. In biology, he is known for the Hardy–Weinberg principle, a basic principle of population genetics.
In mathematics, Helmut Hasse's local–global principle, also known as the Hasse principle, is the idea that one can find an integer solution to an equation by using the Chinese remainder theorem to piece together solutions modulo powers of each different prime number. This is handled by examining the equation in the completions of the rational numbers: the real numbers and the p-adic numbers. A more formal version of the Hasse principle states that certain types of equations have a rational solution if and only if they have a solution in the real numbers and in the p-adic numbers for each prime p.
Klaus Friedrich Roth was a German-born British mathematician who won the Fields Medal for proving Roth's theorem on the Diophantine approximation of algebraic numbers. He was also a winner of the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Nigel James Hitchin FRS is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, gauge theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
In mathematics, the Lindelöf hypothesis is a conjecture by Finnish mathematician Ernst Leonard Lindelöf about the rate of growth of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line. This hypothesis is implied by the Riemann hypothesis. It says that for any ε > 0,
Paul D. Seymour is a British mathematician known for his work in discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. He was responsible for important progress on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, linkless embeddings, graph minors and structure, the perfect graph conjecture, the Hadwiger conjecture, claw-free graphs, χ-boundedness, and the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture. Many of his recent papers are available from his website.
Philip Hall FRS, was an English mathematician. His major work was on group theory, notably on finite groups and solvable groups.
Ben Joseph Green FRS is a British mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and number theory. He is the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
Graham Higman FRS was a prominent English mathematician known for his contributions to group theory.
In number theory and algebraic geometry, a rational point of an algebraic variety is a point whose coordinates belong to a given field. If the field is not mentioned, the field of rational numbers is generally understood. If the field is the field of real numbers, a rational point is more commonly called a real point.
The Ax–Kochen theorem, named for James Ax and Simon B. Kochen, states that for each positive integer d there is a finite set Yd of prime numbers, such that if p is any prime not in Yd then every homogeneous polynomial of degree d over the p-adic numbers in at least d2 + 1 variables has a nontrivial zero.
In mathematics, Kummer sum is the name given to certain cubic Gauss sums for a prime modulus p, with p congruent to 1 modulo 3. They are named after Ernst Kummer, who made a conjecture about the statistical properties of their arguments, as complex numbers. These sums were known and used before Kummer, in the theory of cyclotomy.
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.
Richard Paul Winsley Thomas is a British mathematician working in several areas of geometry. He is a professor at Imperial College London. He studies moduli problems in algebraic geometry, and ‘mirror symmetry’—a phenomenon in pure mathematics predicted by string theory in theoretical physics.
James Alexander Maynard is an English mathematician working in analytic number theory and in particular the theory of prime numbers. In 2017, he was appointed Research Professor at Oxford. Maynard is a fellow of St John's College, Oxford. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022 and the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in 2023.
George Leo Watson was a British mathematician, who specialized in number theory.
Jeremy Rickard, also known as J. C. Rickard or J. Rickard, is a British mathematician who deals with algebra and algebraic topology. He researches modular representation theory of finite groups and related questions of algebraic topology, representation theory of finite algebras and homological algebra. Rickard or derived equivalences as a generalization of Morita equivalences of rings and algebras are named after him.
Samuel James Patterson is a Northern Irish mathematician specializing in analytic number theory. He has been a professor at the University of Göttingen since 1981.