Woodrow Dale Brownawell (born April 21, 1942) is an American mathematician who has performed research in number theory and

algebraic geometry Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics, classically studying zeros of multivariate polynomials. Modern algebraic geometry is based on the use of abstract algebraic techniques, mainly from commutative algebra, for solving geometrical ...

. He is a Distinguished Professor emeritus at

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...

,Curriculum vitae
retrieved January 25, 2015. and is particularly known for his proof of explicit degree bounds that can be used to turn Hilbert's Nullstellensatz into an effective algorithm. Brownawell was born in Grundy County, Missouri; his father was a farmer and train inspector.. He earned a double baccalaureate in German and mathematics (with highest distinction) in 1964 from the University of Kansas, and after studying for a year at the University of Hamburg (at which he met Eva, the woman he later married) he returned to the US for graduate study at Cornell University. His graduate advisor, Stephen Schanuel, moved to

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

in 1969, and Brownawell followed him there for a year, but earned his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1970. That year, he joined the Penn State faculty, and he remained there until his retirement in 2013. Brownawell and

Michel Waldschmidt Michel Waldschmidt (born June 17, 1946 at Nancy, France) is a French mathematician, specializing in number theory, especially transcendental numbers. Biography Waldschmidt was educated at Lycée Henri Poincaré and the University of Nancy unti ...

shared the 1986 Hardy–Ramanujan Prize for their independent proofs that at least one of the two numbers

e^e

and

e^

is a transcendental number; here

e

denotes Euler's number, approximately 2.718. In 2004, a conference at the University of Waterloo was held in honor of Brownawell's 60th birthday. In 2012, he became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved January 25, 2015.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Brownawell, Woodrow Dale 1942 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians American number theorists University of Kansas alumni Cornell University alumni Pennsylvania State University faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Mathematicians from Missouri People from Grundy County, Missouri