Daniel Quillen | |
---|---|
Born |
Orange, New Jersey |
June 22, 1940
Died | April 30, 2011 Haven Hospice,North Florida |
(aged 70)
Nationality | American |
Fields | Mathematics |
Thesis | Formal Properties of Over-Determined Systems of Linear Partial Differential Equations (1964) |
Doctoral advisor | Raoul Bott |
Doctoral students | Kenneth Brown |
Influences |
Alexander Grothendieck Jean-Pierre Serre |
Notable awards |
Fields Medal (1978) Cole Prize (1975) Putnam Fellow (1959) |
Daniel Gray "Dan" Quillen (June 22, 1940 – April 30, 2011) was an American mathematician.
From 1984 to 2006, he was the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is known for being the "prime architect" of higher algebraic K-theory, for which he was awarded the Cole Prize in 1975 and the Fields Medal in 1978.
Quillen was born in Orange, New Jersey, and attended Newark Academy. He entered Harvard University, where he earned both his AB, in 1961, and his PhD in 1964; the latter completed under the supervision of Raoul Bott, with a thesis in partial differential equations. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1959.
Quillen obtained a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after completing his doctorate. However, he also spent a number of years at several other universities, including the University of Chicago as a Dickson instructor. He visited France twice: first as a Sloan Fellow in Paris, during the academic year 1968–69, where he was greatly influenced by Grothendieck, and then, during 1973–74, as a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1969–70, he was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he came under the influence of Michael Atiyah. In 1978, Quillen received a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Helsinki.