Robert MacPherson

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Robert MacPherson, 2008

Robert Duncan MacPherson (born May 25, 1944 in Lakewood , Ohio ) is an American mathematician who deals with algebraic geometry .

MacPherson is the son of nuclear physicist Herbert MacPherson, who was responsible for the boron-free production of high-purity graphite in the Manhattan Project and was later deputy director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory . He received his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1966 and received his doctorate in 1970 from Harvard University with Raoul Bott with the dissertation Singularities of Maps and Characteristic Classes .

In 1970 he was an instructor at Brown University , where he became an assistant professor in 1972 and an associate professor in 1974. From 1977 to 1987 he was a professor there. From 1987 to 1994 he was professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and from 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he has been "Hermann Weyl Professor" since 2007.

He was visiting scholar at the Institute des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in 1974/75 and 1980/81 , 1976/77 at the University of Paris VII , 1980 at the Steklow Institute for Mathematics in Moscow , and in 1992 at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn , 1991 in Chicago , 1994 in Utrecht and 2000 in Rome ( La Sapienza University ).

He is known as the inventor (1974) the average homology with his student Mark Goresky , a homology theory for singular spaces , which then in algebraic geometry and beyond - as in the representation theory has been widely used -. Goresky received his PhD from Brown University in 1976.

With William Fulton and others, in the 1970s he gave a strict foundation to the intersection theory of the Italian school of algebraic geometry of the first half of the 20th century. In 1981 both introduced a bivariate theory within the framework of category theory for the study of singular spaces.

In 1992 he received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics . In 2002 he and Goresky received the Leroy P. Steele Prize from the AMS and in 2009 the Heinz Hopf Prize from the ETH Zurich . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1992), the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society (since 1999). He is an honorary doctor from Brown University and Lille University . In 1983 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Warsaw (Global Questions in the Topology of Singular Spaces). He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

In 1967 he and Coveyou (a chess champion who worked in Oak Ridge in radiation protection) developed a test for random number generators (Journal of the ACM), which Donald Knuth called the best known test in his Art of Computing .

MacPherson was also politically active in the 1968 Harvard protest movement against the Vietnam War and later in the Soviet Union. Since 1980 he regularly visited the Soviet Union and later Russia and initially smuggled mathematical works for publication in the West. From 1990 he smuggled money into the Soviet Union that he had previously collected as part of a large fundraising campaign by the American Mathematical Society, and that was given personally to mathematicians.

His PhD students include Mark Goresky (his first PhD student), Kari Vilonen, and Yun Zhiwei .

MacPherson was married until the early 1980s and lives with Mark Goresky. In his free time he hikes and rides his bicycle, is a hobby cook, opera lover, he gardens and works as a carpenter and craftsman. During his college days he studied classical piano (with a preference for Johann Sebastian Bach ).

Fonts (selection)

  • Chern classes for singular algebraic varieties. Ann. of Math. (2) 100: 423-432 (1974).
  • with M. Goresky: Intersection homology. I : Topology 19 (1980) no. 2, 135-162. II .: Invent. Math. 72 (1983) no. 1, 77-129.
  • with M. Goresky: Stratified Morse theory. Results of mathematics and their border areas (3), 14. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1988. ISBN 3-540-17300-5
  • with W. Fulton: A compactification of configuration spaces. Ann. of Math. (2) 139 (1994) no. 1, 183-225.
  • with M. Goresky, R. Kottwitz: Equivariant cohomology, Koszul duality, and the localization theorem. Invent. Math. 131 (1998) no. 1, 25-83.

Web links

 Wikinews: Heinz Hopf Prize goes to mathematician Robert MacPherson  - message

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Necessary because boron absorbed neutrons, which was undesirable because the graphite served as a neutron moderator in nuclear reactors
  2. ↑ Goresky, MacPherson: Intersection Homology Theory 1,2 . Topology Vol. 19, 1980, p. 135, Inventiones Mathematicae Vol. 72, 1983, p. 77.
  3. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ↑ Interview, Simons Foundation, May 2012
personal data
SURNAME MacPherson, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES MacPherson, Robert Duncan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Lakewood (Ohio) , Ohio