Richard Lawrence Taylor (born 19 May 1962) is a British mathematician working in the field of number theory. A former research student of Andrew Wiles, he returned to Princeton to help his advisor complete the proof of Fermat's last theorem.

Taylor received the 2007 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for his work on the Langlands program with Robert Langlands.

Academic career

He received his B.A. from Clare College, Cambridge,[1][2] and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988. From 1995 to 1996 he held the Savilian Chair of Geometry[1] at Oxford University and Fellow of New College, Oxford[2], and he is currently the Herchel Smith Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.

He received the Whitehead Prize in 1990, the Fermat Prize, the Ostrowski Prize in 2001, the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 2002, and the Shaw Prize for Mathematics in 2007. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995.

Work

One of the two papers containing the published proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is a joint work of Taylor and Andrew Wiles.[3]

In subsequent work, Taylor (along with Michael Harris) proved the local Langlands conjectures for GL(n) over a number field.[4] A simpler proof was suggested almost at the same time by Guy Henniart.

Taylor, together with Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, and Fred Diamond, completed the proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, by performing quite heavy technical computations in the case of additive reduction [5]

Recently, Taylor, following the ideas of Michael Harris and building on his joint work with Laurent Clozel, Michael Harris, and Nick Shepherd-Barron, has announced a proof of the Sato-Tate conjecture, for elliptic curves with non-integral j-invariant. This partial proof of the Sato-Tate conjecture uses Wiles's theorem about modularity of semistable elliptic curves.[6]

Personal life

Taylor is married to Christine Taylor (a mathematical biologist). They have two children: Jeremy and Chloe. He is also the son of British physicist, John C. Taylor.

References

1. ^ a b SAVILIAN PROFESSORSHIP OF GEOMETRY in NOTICES, University Gazette 23.3.95 No. 4359 [1]
2. ^ a b ‘TAYLOR, Prof. Richard Lawrence’, Who's Who 2008, A & C Black, 2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007 accessed 27 March 2008
3. ^ R. Taylor and A. Wiles, Ring theoretic properties of certain Hecke algebras, Ann. of Math. 141 (1995), no. 3, pp. 553-572 (subscription required to view article)
4. ^ M. Harris and R. Taylor, The geometry and cohomology of some simple Shimura varieties, Annals of Mathematics Studies, no. 151, Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-691-09090-4
5. ^ C. Breuil, B. Conrad, F. Diamond and R. Taylor, On the modularity of elliptic curves over Q : wild 3-adic exercises, J. Amer. Math. Soc. 14 (2001), no. 4, pp. 843-939
6. ^ R. Taylor, Automorphy for some l-adic lifts of automorphic mod l representations. II, preprint available at his website.

External links

* His home page at Harvard
* Richard Taylor at the Mathematics Genealogy Project