11 Facts About Michael Artin

Michael Artin is a German-American mathematician and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry.

Michael Artin or Artinian of Armenian origin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana.

Michael Artin's parents were Natalia Naumovna Jasny and Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20th century of Armenian descent.

Michael Artin collaborated with Barry Mazur to define etale homotopy theory which has become an important tool in algebraic geometry, and applied ideas from algebraic geometry to the study of diffeomorphisms of compact manifolds.

Michael Artin has made important contributions to the deformation theory of algebraic varieties, serving as the basis for all future work in this area of algebraic geometry.

Michael Artin contributed to the theory of surface singularities which are both fundamental and seminal.

Michael Artin began to turn his interest from algebraic geometry to noncommutative algebra, especially geometric aspects, after a talk by Shimshon Amitsur and an encounter in University of Chicago with Claudio Procesi and Lance W Small, "which prompted [his] first foray into ring theory".

In 2002, Michael Artin won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Michael Artin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Society.

Michael Artin is a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and Honorary Fellow of the Moscow Mathematical Society, and was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Hamburg and Antwerp, Belgium.

Michael Artin was invited to give a talk on the topic "The Etale Topology of Schemes" at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1966 in Moscow, USSR.