Michael Artin

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Michael Artin

Michael Artin (photo by George Bergman)

Born

28 June 1934 (age80)

Hamburg, Germany

Nationality

American

Fields

Mathematics

Institutions

MIT

Alma mater

Harvard University
Princeton University

Thesis

On Enriques'
Surfaces(1960)

Doctoral advisor

Oscar Zariski

Doctoral students

Eric Friedlander
David Harbater
Rick Miranda
Zinovy Reichstein
Amnon Yekutieli
Jian James Zhang

Notable awards

Harvard Centennial Medal

(2005)
Steele Prize (2002)
Wolf Prize (2013)

Michael Artin (German: [atin]; born 28 June 1934) is an American mathematician and a
professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematics department, known
for his contributions to algebraic geometry[1] and also generally recognized as one of the
outstanding professors in his field.[2]

Life and career

Artin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana. His parents were Natalia
Naumovna Jasny (Natascha) and Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20th century. Artin's
parents had left Germany in 1937, because Michael Artin's maternal grandfather was Jewish.[3]
Artin did his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, receiving an A.B. in 1955; he then
moved to Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of Oscar
Zariski.[1][4]
In the early 1960s Artin spent time at the IHS in France, contributing to the SGA4 volumes of
the Sminaire de gomtrie algbrique, on topos theory and tale cohomology. His work on the
problem of characterising the representable functors in the category of schemes has led to the
Artin approximation theorem, in local algebra. This work also gave rise to the ideas of an
algebraic space and algebraic stack, and has proved very influential in moduli theory.
Additionally, he has made contributions to the deformation theory of algebraic varieties. He is
currently working on noncommutative rings, especially geometric aspects.[citation needed]
In 2002, Artin won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime
Achievement. In 2005, he was awarded the Harvard Centennial Medal. In 2013 he won the Wolf
Prize in Mathematics. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969),[5] the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics,[1] and the
American Mathematical Society.[6]