John Tate

John Tate (born March 13, 1925, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.—died October 16, 2019, Lexington, Massachusetts) was an American mathematician awarded the 2010 Abel Prize “for his vast and lasting impact on the theory of numbers.”

Tate received an undergraduate degree in 1946 from Harvard University and a doctorate in 1950 from Princeton University, where he studied under Austro-German mathematician Emil Artin. In his doctoral dissertation, Fourier Analysis in Number Fields and Hecke’s Zeta-Function, he applied harmonic analysis (the mathematical procedure for describing and analyzing phenomena of a periodically recurrent nature) to the study of a certain class of zeta function called Hecke L-functions. Tate was an instructor at Princeton from 1950 to 1953 and a visiting professor at Columbia University from 1953 to 1954. In 1954 he became a professor at Harvard University. In the 1950s Tate became one of the few non-French members of Nicolas Bourbaki, a pseudonymous group of young French mathematicians. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, retiring as professor emeritus in 2009.

As a testimony to Tate’s stature in the fields of number theory and algebraic geometry, many concepts used in those disciplines bear his name—e.g., the Tate twist, the Tate-Shafarevich group, the Tate module, Tate cohomology, the Tate duality theorem, the Tate trace, Hodge-Tate decompositions, and the Sato-Tate conjecture. One of his particular interests was elliptic curves, which are real number solutions to cubic polynomial equations, such as y² − x³ = c. This work has applications in the field of cryptography in that it can be used to factor extremely large prime numbers, which are used in secure communications.

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In 1956 Tate received the Cole Prize from the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for his contributions to number theory, and in 1995 the AMS also awarded him the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement. Tate shared the 2002–03 Wolf Prize in Mathematics, a prestigious international award presented in recognition of outstanding work in the field of mathematics, with Japanese mathematician Sato Mikio. Among his books are Class Field Theory (coauthored with Artin, 1967), Les Conjectures de Stark sur les fonctions L d’Artin en s=0 (1984; “The Stark Conjectures on the Artin L-Functions for s=0”), and Rational Points on Elliptic Curves (with Joseph H. Silverman, 1992).