13 Facts About Don Zagier

Don Bernard Zagier was born on 29 June 1951 and is an American-German mathematician whose main area of work is number theory.

Don Zagier is currently one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany.

Don Zagier was a professor at the College de France in Paris from 2006 to 2014.

Don Zagier's mother was a psychiatrist, and his father was the dean of instruction at the American College of Switzerland.

Don Zagier's father held five different citizenships, and he spent his youth living in many different countries.

Don Zagier then wrote a doctoral dissertation on characteristic classes under Friedrich Hirzebruch at Bonn, receiving his PhD at 20.

Don Zagier received his Habilitation at the age of 23, and was named professor at the age of 24.

Hirzebruch and Don 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.

Don Zagier collaborated with John Harer to calculate the orbifold Euler characteristics of moduli spaces of algebraic curves, relating them to special values of the Riemann zeta function.

Don Zagier later formulated a general conjecture giving formulas for special values of Dedekind zeta functions in terms of polylogarithm functions.

Don Zagier discovered a short and elementary proof of Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares.

Don Zagier won the Cole Prize in Number Theory in 1987, the Chauvenet Prize in 2000, the von Staudt Prize in 2001, the Heinz Gumin Prize in 2024 and the Gauss Lectureship of the German Mathematical Society in 2007.

Don Zagier became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 2017.