Wilfried Schmid (born May 28, 1943) is a

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mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

who works in

Hodge theory In mathematics, Hodge theory, named after W. V. D. Hodge, is a method for studying the cohomology groups of a smooth manifold ''M'' using partial differential equations. The key observation is that, given a Riemannian metric on ''M'', every cohom ...

representation theory Representation theory is a branch of mathematics that studies abstract algebraic structures by ''representing'' their elements as linear transformations of vector spaces, and studies modules over these abstract algebraic structures. In essen ...

, and

automorphic form In harmonic analysis and number theory, an automorphic form is a well-behaved function from a topological group ''G'' to the complex numbers (or complex vector space) which is invariant under the action of a discrete subgroup \Gamma \subset G of ...

s. After graduating as valedictorian of

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

's class of 1964, Schmid earned his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1967 under the direction of

Phillip Griffiths Phillip Augustus Griffiths IV (born October 18, 1938) is an American mathematician, known for his work in the field of geometry, and in particular for the complex manifold approach to algebraic geometry. He was a major developer in particul ...

, and then taught at Berkeley and

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, becoming a full professor at Columbia at age 27. In 1978, he moved to

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, where he served as the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics until his retirement in 2019.Biography of Dr. Wilfried Schmid
U.S. Department of Education via

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

. Schmid's early work concerns the construction of

discrete series representation In mathematics, a discrete series representation is an irreducible unitary representation of a locally compact topological group ''G'' that is a subrepresentation of the left regular representation of ''G'' on L²(''G''). In the Plancherel meas ...

s of semi-simple

Lie group In mathematics, a Lie group (pronounced ) is a group that is also a differentiable manifold. A manifold is a space that locally resembles Euclidean space, whereas groups define the abstract concept of a binary operation along with the additio ...

s. Notable accomplishments here include a proof of the

Langlands conjecture In representation theory and algebraic number theory, the Langlands program is a web of far-reaching and influential conjectures about connections between number theory and geometry. Proposed by , it seeks to relate Galois groups in algebraic num ...

on the

discrete series In mathematics, a discrete series representation is an irreducible unitary representation of a locally compact topological group ''G'' that is a subrepresentation of the left regular representation of ''G'' on L²(''G''). In the Plancherel measur ...

, along with a later proof (joint with

Michael Atiyah Sir Michael Francis Atiyah (; 22 April 1929 – 11 January 2019) was a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry. His contributions include the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and co-founding topological K-theory. He was awarded the ...

) constructing all such discrete series representations on spaces of harmonic spinors. Schmid, along with his student Henryk Hecht, proved

Blattner's conjecture In mathematics, Blattner's conjecture or Blattner's formula is a description of the discrete series representations of a general semisimple group ''G'' in terms of their restricted representations to a maximal compact subgroup ''K'' (their so-called ...

in 1975. In the 1970s, he described the singularities of the Griffith's period map by applying Lie-theoretic methods to problems in

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 ...

.“Wilfried Schmid, Harvard University, Biosketch
National Academy of Sciences, retrieved 2022-05-22. Schmid has been very involved in K–12 mathematics education in his home state, and both nationally and internationally. His interest arose in 1999 after being disturbed by the experiences of his 2nd-grade daughter, Sabina, in her mathematics class. He was heavily involved in the drafting of the Massachusetts Mathematics Curriculum Framework in 2000. Later, he served on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel of the

U.S. Department of Education The United States Department of Education is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government. It began operating on May 4, 1980, having been created after the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was split into the Department ...

. He has opposed new ways of teaching children that would neglect basic math skills. In 2012, he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-07-14. and in 2020 he was elected as a member of the U.S.

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

References

External links

*
Schmid's Harvard websiteInterview in 2022
“Harvard Mathematician Prof. Wilfried Schmid on K-12 Standards & Results” (April 27, 2022). {{DEFAULTSORT:Schmid, Wilfried 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 20th-century German mathematicians Algebraic geometers Differential geometers Harvard University faculty German emigrants to the United States 1943 births Living people Fellows of the American Mathematical Society