David Harbater

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David Harbater is an American mathematician, well known for his work in Galois theory, algebraic geometry and arithmetic geometry.

Harbater attended Stuyvesant High School, where he was on the Math Team. After graduating in 1970, he entered Harvard University, where one of his classmates and a fellow alumnus of the Columbia Science Honors Program was the future guru of open source software, Richard Stallman. Sam Williams' biography of Stallman, Free as in Freedom, paraphrases Harbater's remarks about Math 55 at Harvard, a "boot camp" advanced freshman course in mathematics:

It was an amazing class. It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school.

After graduating summa cum laude in 1974, Harbater earned a master's degree from Brandeis University and then a Ph.D. in 1978 from MIT, where he wrote a dissertation under the direction of Michael Artin.

In 1995, Harbater was awarded the Cole Prize for his solution, with Michel Raynaud, of the long outstanding Abhyankar conjecture.

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  • Harbater, D. (1994). "Abhyankar's Conjecture on Galois Groups Over Curves". Invent. Math. 117: 1–25. doi:10.1007/BF01232232. 
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