Patrick X. Gallagher
American mathematician (1935–2019)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Patrick Ximenes Gallagher (January 2, 1935[1][2] – March 30, 2019)[2][3] was an American mathematician who pioneered large sieve theory and invented the larger sieve.
larger sieve
Patrick X. Gallagher | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 2, 1935 Elizabeth, New Jersey, US |
| Died | March 30, 2019 (aged 84) |
| Education | Harvard University Princeton University |
| Known for | large sieve larger sieve |
| Awards | Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award (2005) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Workplaces | Columbia University Barnard College Institute for Advanced Study Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Donald C. Spencer | |
Doctoral students | Dorian M. Goldfeld |
Biography
Early life
Patrick Ximenes Gallagher was born on January 2, 1935, in Elizabeth, New Jersey to school superintendent Ralph P. Gallagher and elementary school teacher Natalie Forcheimer Gallagher.[1][4][5] Gallagher graduated from Bound Brook High School and received a scholarship from the Harvard Club of New Jersey to attend Harvard University.[5][6]
Education
In 1956, Gallagher received a B.A. degree magna cum laude from Harvard University.[7][5] At Harvard, he was a member of the Harvard Mathematics Club and Eliot House Mathematics-Physics Club and completed an undergraduate honors thesis entitled On a property of some entire functions.[6] In 1959, Gallagher received a PhD from Princeton University with a doctoral dissertation entitled Metric Diophantine Approximation in One and Several Dimensions completed under the supervision of Donald C. Spencer.[8]
Career
After receiving his doctoral degree, Gallagher served as an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1961.[1] He spent one year living in the Latin Quarter of Paris before becoming an assistant professor at Columbia University in 1962.[1][9] He moved from Columbia to become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study for the 1964-1965 academic year.[1] From 1965 to 1972, he was an associate professor and then full professor at Barnard College.[1][7]
In 1972, Gallagher moved back to Columbia University as a professor of mathematics.[10][11][1] Gallagher received the Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award in 2005[7] and became director of undergraduate studies in the department of mathematics in 2013.[10][11] He retired from Columbia in 2017 and was professor emeritus until his death in 2019.[3]
Research
In the 1960s and 1970s, Gallagher proved several results in large sieve methods in analytic number theory and simplified key ingredients used in the proof of the Bombieri–Vinogradov theorem.[12][13] He also applied the large sieve to study the asymptotics of Galois groups of monic integral polynomials of bounded height, improving on results by van der Waerden.[14][15]
In 1971, he invented the larger sieve.[16]