| Robert F. Coleman | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater | Harvard University Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Kenkichi Iwasawa |
| Doctoral students | Pavlos Tzermias |
| Known for | Coleman-Mazur eigencurve |
| Notable awards |
MacArthur Fellow (1987) Intel STS (1972) |
Robert F. Coleman is an American mathematician, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.[1] His primary research area is in number theory, with specific interest in p-adic analysis and arithmetic geometry. In particular, he is known for the study of curves of number fields and the Diophantine properties of sets of torsion points, where he has developed techniques of p-adic integration, producing analogies of abelian integrals. He is also known for introducing p-adic Banach spaces into the study of modular forms.
He is an alumnus of Nova High School. In high school he showed prodigiousness in mathematics and was already active in the field. He completed his bachelor's degree at Harvard University and subsequently attended Cambridge University for part III of the mathematical tripos. While there John H. Coates provided him with a problem for his doctoral thesis, which he later completed at Princeton University under the advising of Kenkichi Iwasawa. The title of his thesis was Division Values in Local Fields, and it was later cited in Andrew Wiles's final paper presenting the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
He completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford, where he was an adjunct professor for a year. He left at 26 to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remains today.