Michael J. Larsen
American mathematician
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Michael Jeffrey Larsen is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington.[1][2]
Michael Larsen | |
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| Alma mater | Princeton University Harvard University |
| Awards | Putnam Fellow (1981, 1983) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania University of Missouri Indiana University Bloomington |
| Thesis | Unitary groups and L-adic representations (1988) |
| Doctoral advisor | Gerd Faltings |
Academic biography
In high school, Larsen tied with four other competitors for the top score in the 1977 International Mathematical Olympiad in Belgrade, winning a gold medal.[3][4] As an undergraduate mathematics student at Harvard University, Larsen became a Putnam Fellow in 1981 and 1983.[5] He graduated from Harvard in 1984,[6] and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988, under the supervision of Gerd Faltings.[7] After working at the Institute for Advanced Study he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, and then moved to the University of Missouri in 1997.[6] He joined the Indiana University faculty in 2001.[1]
His wife Ayelet Lindenstrauss (Elon Lindenstrauss' sister) is also a mathematician and Indiana University professor.[8] Their son Daniel at age 13 became the youngest person to publish a crossword in the New York Times.[9] In 2022, Daniel published a discovery about Carmichael numbers.
Research
Larsen is known for his research in arithmetic algebraic geometry, combinatorial group theory, combinatorics, and number theory.[1][2] He has written highly cited papers on domino tiling of Aztec diamonds,[10] topological quantum computing,[11][12] and on the representation theory of braid groups.[13]
Awards and honors
In 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to group theory, number theory, topology, and algebraic geometry".[14] He received the E. H. Moore Research Article Prize of the AMS in 2013 (jointly with Richard Pink).
Selected publications
- Elkies, Noam; Kuperberg, Greg; Larsen, Michael; Propp, James (1992), "Alternating-sign matrices and domino tilings. I", Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, 1 (2): 111–132, arXiv:math.CO/9201305, doi:10.1023/A:1022420103267, MR 1226347, S2CID 41082861.
- Freedman, Michael H.; Larsen, Michael; Wang, Zhenghan (2002a), "A modular functor which is universal for quantum computation", Communications in Mathematical Physics, 227 (3): 605–622, Bibcode:2002CMaPh.227..605F, doi:10.1007/s002200200645, MR 1910833, S2CID 8990600.
- Freedman, Michael H.; Larsen, Michael J.; Wang, Zhenghan (2002b), "The two-eigenvalue problem and density of Jones representation of braid groups", Communications in Mathematical Physics, 228 (1): 177–199, arXiv:math/0103200, Bibcode:2002CMaPh.228..177F, doi:10.1007/s002200200636, MR 1911253, S2CID 8163385.
- Freedman, Michael H.; Kitaev, Alexei; Larsen, Michael J.; Wang, Zhenghan (2003), "Topological quantum computation", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 40 (1): 31–38, arXiv:quant-ph/0101025, doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-02-00964-3, MR 1943131.