Christopher Skinner
American mathematician (born 1972)
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Christopher McLean Skinner (born 4 June 1972) is an American mathematician and professor at Princeton University. He works in algebraic number theory and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands program.
Christopher Skinner | |
|---|---|
| Born | 4 June 1972 Little Rock, Arkansas |
| Education | University of Michigan, Princeton University |
| Known for | Main conjecture of Iwasawa theory for modular curves |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Workplaces | Princeton University |
| Thesis | Deformations of Galois Representations (1997) |
| Andrew Wiles | |
Doctoral students | Ellen Eischen |
Early life and education
Skinner was born on 4 June 1972, in Little Rock, Arkansas.[1] Skinner graduated with a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1993.[1] He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1997 under the supervision of Andrew Wiles.[1]
Career
Skinner was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1997 to 2000.[1] He was then an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan from 2000 to 2004, and then a full professor from 2004 to 2006.[1] He became a professor of mathematics at Princeton University in 2006.[1]
Research
Skinner and Wiles proved modularity results for residually reducible Galois representations in joint work.[2]
Skinner and Eric Urban proved many cases of Iwasawa–Greenberg main conjectures for a large class of modular forms.[3] As a consequence, for a modular elliptic curve over the rational numbers, they prove that the vanishing of the Hasse–Weil L-function L(E, s) of E at s = 1 implies that the p-adic Selmer group of E is infinite. Combined with theorems of Gross–Zagier and Kolyvagin, this gave a conditional proof (on the Tate–Shafarevich conjecture) of the conjecture that E has infinitely many rational points if and only if L(E, 1) = 0, a (weak) form of the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. These results were used by Manjul Bhargava, Skinner, and Wei Zhang to prove that a positive proportion of elliptic curves satisfy the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.[4][5]
Awards and honors
Skinner was a Packard Foundation Fellow from 2001 to 2006[1][6] and a Sloan Research Fellow from 2001 to 2002.[1] He was named an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013.[7] In 2015, he was named a Simons Investigator in Mathematics.[8][9]
He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006.[10]