David Harbater

David Harbater
Born	December 19, 1952 (1952-12-19) (age 58) New York City, New York, USA
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater	MIT Brandeis University Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Michael Artin
Doctoral students	Eric Dew Tamara Lefcourt Rachel Pries
Known for	Proof of Abhyankar's conjecture
Notable awards	Cole Prize (1995)

David Harbater (born December 19, 1952) is an American mathematician, well known for his work in Galois theory, algebraic geometry and arithmetic geometry.

Life and work

Harbater was born in New York City and attended Stuyvesant High School, where he was on the Math Team. After graduating in 1970, he entered Harvard University, where one of his classmates and a fellow alumnus of the Columbia Science Honors Program was the future guru of open source software, Richard Stallman. Sam Williams' biography of Stallman, Free as in Freedom, paraphrases Harbater's remarks about Math 55 at Harvard, a "boot camp" advanced freshman course in mathematics:

It was an amazing class. It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school.

After graduating summa cum laude in 1974, Harbater earned a master's degree from Brandeis University and then a Ph.D. in 1978 from MIT, where he wrote a dissertation under the direction of Michael Artin.

In 1995, Harbater was awarded the Cole Prize for his solution, with Michel Raynaud, of the long outstanding Abhyankar conjecture.

Harbater is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania teaching various levels of mathematics.

See also

• List of University of Pennsylvania people
• List of Stuyvesant High School people

References

• Harbater, D. (1994). "Abhyankar's Conjecture on Galois Groups Over Curves". Invent. Math. 117 (1): 1–25. doi:10.1007/BF01232232. 

External links

• Recollections of Arthur Rothstein, (Math Teammate of Harbater)
• Cole Prize citation for David Harbater
• David Harbater at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• Harbater's home page at Penn
• Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams

Persondata
Name	Harbater, David
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	December 19, 1952
Place of birth	New York City, New York, USA
Date of death
Place of death