James Arthur | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1944-05-18)May 18, 1944 (age 81) Hamilton, Ontario, Canada |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto (BSc,MSc) Yale University (PhD) |
| Known for | Arthur–Selberg trace formula Arthur conjectures |
| Awards | John L. Synge Award (1987) Jeffery–Williams Prize (1993) CRM-Fields-PIMS prize (1997) Henry Marshall Tory Medal (1997) Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering (1999) Wolf Prize (2015) Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2017) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Yale University Duke University University of Toronto |
| Thesis | Analysis of Tempered Distributions on Semisimple Lie Groups of Real Rank One (1970) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert Langlands |
| Doctoral students | Cristina Ballantine |
James Greig ArthurCC FRSC FRS (born May 18, 1944)[1] is a Canadian mathematician working onautomorphic forms, and former President of theAmerican Mathematical Society. He is a Mossman Chair and University Professor Emeritus at theUniversity of Toronto Department of Mathematics.[2] He won theWolf Prize in 2015 "for his monumental work on thetrace formula and his fundamental contributions to the theory ofautomorphic representations ofreductive groups".[3]
Born inHamilton, Ontario, Arthur graduated fromUpper Canada College in 1962,[4] received a BSc from the University of Toronto in 1966, and a MSc from the same institution in 1967. He received his PhD fromYale University in 1970. He was a student ofRobert Langlands; his dissertation wasAnalysis of Tempered Distributions on Semisimple Lie Groups of Real Rank One.[5]
Arthur taught at Yale from 1970 until 1976. He joined the faculty ofDuke University in 1976. He has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1978.[1] He was four times a visiting scholar at theInstitute for Advanced Study between 1976 and 2002.[6]
Arthur is known for theArthur–Selberg trace formula, generalizing theSelberg trace formula from the rank-one case (due to Selberg himself) to generalreductive groups, one of the most important tools for research on theLanglands program. He also introduced theArthur conjectures. His seminal 2013 bookThe endoscopic classification of representations—orthogonal and symplectic groups uses the trace formula to establish important special cases of the Langlands Functoriality Principle.[7]
Arthur was elected aFellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1981 and aFellow of the Royal Society in 1992.[8][9] In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of theInternational Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.[10] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.[11] In 2012 he became a fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society.[12]He was elected as a fellow of theCanadian Mathematical Society in 2019.[13]
