Awards & Winners

Don Zagier

Date of Birth 29-June-1951
Place of Birth Heidelberg
(Baden-Württemberg, Germany, Heidelberg)
Nationality United States of America, Germany
Profession Mathematician
Don Bernard Zagier is an American mathematician whose main area of work is number theory. He is currently one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, France. He was born in Heidelberg, West Germany. His mother was a psychiatrist, and his father was the dean of instruction at the American College of Switzerland. His father held five different citizenships, and he spent his youth living in many different countries. After finishing high school and attending Winchester College for a year, he studied for three years at M.I.T., completing his bachelor's and master's degrees and being named a Putnam Fellow in 1967 at the age of 16. He then wrote a doctoral dissertation on characteristic classes under Friedrich Hirzebruch at Bonn, receiving his PhD at 20. He received his Habilitation at the age of 23, and was named professor at age 24. He collaborated with Hirzebruch in work on Hilbert modular surfaces. Hirzebruch and Zagier coauthored Intersection numbers of curves on Hilbert modular surfaces and modular forms of Nebentypus, where they proved that intersection numbers of algebraic cycles on a Hilbert modular surface occur as Fourier coefficients of a modular form. Stephen Kudla, John Millson and others generalized this result to intersection numbers of algebraic cycles on arithmetic quotients of symmetric spaces.

Awards by Don Zagier

Check all the awards nominated and won by Don Zagier.

2000


Chauvenet Prize
(For his work, Newman's Short Proof of the Prime Number Theorem.)