James Greig Arthur (born May 18, 1944) is a Canadian mathematician working on automorphic forms, and former President 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, ...

. He is a Mossman Chair and University Professor at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics.

Education and career

Born in

Hamilton, Ontario Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Hamilton has a population of 569,353, and its census metropolitan area, which includes Burlington and Grimsby, has a population of 785,184. The city is approximately southwest of T ...

, Arthur graduated from Upper Canada College in 1962, received a BSc from the University of Toronto in 1966, and a MSc from the same institution in 1967. He received his PhD from

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

in 1970. He was a student of

Robert Langlands Robert Phelan Langlands, (; born October 6, 1936) is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study o ...

; his dissertation was ''Analysis of Tempered Distributions on Semisimple Lie Groups of Real Rank One''. Arthur taught at Yale from 1970 until 1976. He joined the faculty of

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

in 1976. He has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1978. He was four times a visiting scholar at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

between 1976 and 2002.

Contributions

Arthur is known for the

Arthur–Selberg trace formula In mathematics, the Arthur–Selberg trace formula is a generalization of the Selberg trace formula from the group SL2 to arbitrary reductive groups over global fields, developed by James Arthur (mathematician), James Arthur in a long series of pape ...

, generalizing the Selberg trace formula from the rank-one case (due to Selberg himself) to general reductive groups, one of the most important tools for research on the Langlands program. He also introduced the

Arthur conjectures In mathematics, the Arthur conjectures are some conjectures about automorphic representations of reductive groups over the adeles and unitary representations of reductive groups over local fields made by , motivated by the Arthur–Selberg trace for ...

Recognition

Arthur was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Canada judges to have "made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life ...

in 1981 and a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

in 1992. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the

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 ...

in Berlin. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 2003. In 2012 he became a fellow of the

. He was elected as a fellow of the

Canadian Mathematical Society The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) (french: Société mathématique du Canada) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research, outreach, scholarship and education in Canada. It serves the ...

in 2019.

References

External links

*
Works of James Arthur
at the

Clay institute The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) is a private, non-profit foundation dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge. Formerly based in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the corporate address is now in Denver, Colorado. CMI's scie ...

Archive of Collected Works of James Arthur
at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics
Wolf Prizes 2015

Author profile
in the database zbMATH {{DEFAULTSORT:Arthur, James Living people 1944 births 20th-century Canadian mathematicians Companions of the Order of Canada Duke University faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the Canadian Mathematical Society Canadian Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars People from Hamilton, Ontario Presidents of the American Mathematical Society University of Toronto alumni University of Toronto faculty Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Yale University faculty 21st-century Canadian mathematicians

Education and career

Contributions

Recognition

References

Further reading

External links