David Bryant Mumford was born on 11 June 1937 and is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry and then for research into vision and pattern theory.
15 Facts About David Mumford
2.
David Mumford won the Fields Medal and was a MacArthur Fellow.
3.
David Mumford is currently a University Professor Emeritus in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.
4.
David Mumford attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he received a Westinghouse Science Talent Search prize for his relay-based computer project.
5.
David Mumford then went to Harvard University, where he became a student of Oscar Zariski.
6.
David Mumford completed his PhD in 1961, with a thesis entitled Existence of the moduli scheme for curves of any genus.
7.
David Mumford married Erika, an author and poet, in 1959 and they had four children, Stephen, Peter, Jeremy, and Suchitra.
8.
David Mumford published on moduli spaces, with a theory summed up in his book Geometric Invariant Theory, on the equations defining an abelian variety, and on algebraic surfaces.
9.
David Mumford's research did much to revive the classical theory of theta functions, by showing that its algebraic content was large, and enough to support the main parts of the theory by reference to finite analogues of the Heisenberg group.
10.
David Mumford published some further books of lectures on the theory.
11.
David Mumford was one of the founders of the toroidal embedding theory; and sought to apply the theory to Grobner basis techniques, through students who worked in algebraic computation.
12.
David Mumford was a MacArthur Fellow from 1987 to 1992.
13.
In 2008 he was awarded the Wolf Prize; on receiving the prize in Jerusalem from Shimon Peres, David Mumford announced that he was donating half of the prize money to Birzeit University in the Palestinian territories and half to Gisha, an Israeli organization that promotes the right to freedom of movement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
14.
David Mumford served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009 and 2010.
15.
David Mumford was elected President of the International Mathematical Union in 1995 and served from 1995 to 1999.