Ralph Greenberg (born 1944) is an American
mathematician who has made contributions to
number theory, in particular
Iwasawa theory.
He was born in
Chester, Pennsylvania and studied at the
University of Pennsylvania, earning a B.A. in 1966,
after which he attended
Princeton University, earning his
doctorate in 1971 under the supervision of
Kenkichi Iwasawa.
Greenberg's results include a proof (joint with
Glenn Stevens
Glenn Robert Stevens (born 23 January 1958) is an Australian economist who was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia from 2006 to 2016.
Early life and education
Stevens was born in Sydney in 1958.
He graduated from the University of ...
) of the
Mazur–Tate–Teitelbaum conjecture as well as a formula for the derivative of a
''p''-adic Dirichlet ''L''-function at
(joint with Bruce Ferrero). Greenberg is also well known for
his many conjectures. In his PhD thesis, he conjectured that the Iwasawa μ- and λ-invariants of the cyclotomic
-extension of a
totally real field are zero, a conjecture that remains open as of September 2012. In the 1980s, he introduced the notion of a
Selmer group for a
''p''-adic Galois representation and generalized the
"main conjectures" of Iwasawa and
Barry Mazur
Barry Charles Mazur (; born December 19, 1937) is an American mathematician and the Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University. His contributions to mathematics include his contributions to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in ...
to this setting. He has since generalized this setup to present Iwasawa theory as the theory of ''p''-adic deformations of
motives. He also provided an arithmetic theory of ''L''-invariants generalizing his aforementioned work with Stevens.
Greenberg was an invited speaker in
International Congress of Mathematicians
The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU).
The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...
2010,
Hyderabad on the topic of "''Number Theory.''"
In 2012, he became a fellow of the
American Mathematical Society.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Greenburg publicly disputed
NASA conspiracy theorist and
pseudoscientist Richard C. Hoagland
Richard Charles Hoagland (born April 25, 1945), is an American author and a proponent of various conspiracy theories about NASA, lost alien civilizations on the Moon and on Mars and other related topics. Hoagland has been documented to misappropr ...
's mathematical interpretations of the so-called "D&M Pyramid" and surrounding features found on the
Cydonia Planitia region of Mars as being conclusive signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and challenged him to a public debate. Hoagland has yet to respond.
References
External links
*
1944 births
Living people
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Princeton University alumni
University of Washington faculty
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Number theorists
People from Chester, Pennsylvania
Mathematicians from Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania alumni
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