R. James Milgram

Richard James Milgram , called James or Jim, (born December 5, 1939 in South Bend , Indiana ) is an American mathematician .

Milgram is the son of mathematician Arthur Milgram . He studied at the University of Chicago ( Master's degree in 1961) and received his doctorate in 1964 from the University of Minnesota with Alfred Aeppli ( The homology ring of symmetric products of Moore spaces ). Milgram taught from 1970 as a professor at Stanford University , where he has now retired. Among other things, he was visiting professor at the University of Lille (2001), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2000) in Beijing, at the University of Göttingen (1987 as Gauss Professor), at the University of Minnesota, the ETH Zurich , in Edinburgh, Montreal, Barcelona, ​​at MSRI and the University of New Mexico .

In addition to algebraic and geometric topology, he dealt intensively with mathematics education and was on numerous committees, including the National Board for Education Sciences (since 2005). He is one of the lead authors of the math standard for schools in California and advised school boards in Michigan, New York, and Georgia.

With Jacques Hurtubise and others in 1992 he proved the Atiyah-Jones conjecture about the topology of the modular space of instantons on spheres.

He also worked on robotics and protein folding.

In 1974 Milgram was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver ( The structure of the oriented topological and piecewise linear bordism rings ). He was editor of Contemporary Mathematics from inception to 1984 and was editor of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics and the Duke Journal of Mathematics .

Gunnar Carlsson is one of his PhD students .

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