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- Mathematician
Michael Artin, 1934
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Michael Artin (born 1934) is an American mathematician and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematics department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry and also generally recognized as one of the outstanding professors in his field.
Artin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana. His parents were Natalia Naumovna Jasny (Natascha) and Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20th century. Artin's parents had left Germany in 1937, because Michael Artin's maternal grandfather was Jewish.
Artin did his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, receiving an A.B. in 1955; he then moved to Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of Oscar Zariski.
In the early 1960s Artin spent time at the IHÉS in France, contributing to the SGA4 volumes of the Séminaire de géométrie algébrique, on topos theory and étale cohomology. His work on the problem of characterizing the representable functors in the category of schemes has led to the Artin approximation theorem, in local algebra. This work also gave rise to the ideas of an algebraic space and algebraic stack, and has proved very influential in moduli theory. Additionally, he has made contributions to the deformation theory of algebraic varieties. Later, he worked on noncommutative rings, especially geometric aspects.
In 2002, Artin won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 2005, he was awarded the Harvard Centennial Medal. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Society.