David Harbater | |
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Born | December 19, 1952 New York City, New York, USA |
Nationality | American |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Pennsylvania |
Alma mater | MIT Brandeis University Harvard University |
Doctoral advisor | Michael Artin |
Doctoral students | Eric Dew Tamara Lefcourt Rachel Pries |
Known for | Proof of Abhyankar's conjecture |
Notable awards | Cole Prize (1995) |
David Harbater (born December 19, 1952) is an American mathematician, well known for his work in Galois theory, algebraic geometry and arithmetic geometry.
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Harbater was born in New York City and 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:
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.
Harbater is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania teaching various levels of mathematics.