Michael Robert Herman (6 November 1942 – 2 November 2000) was a

French American French Americans or Franco-Americans (french: Franco-Américains), are citizens or nationals of the United States who identify themselves with having full or partial French or French-Canadian heritage, ethnicity and/or ancestral ties. They ...

mathematician. He was one of the leading experts on the theory of

dynamical system In mathematics, a dynamical system is a system in which a function describes the time dependence of a point in an ambient space. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a clock pendulum, the flow of water i ...

s. Born in New York City, he was educated in France. He was a student at

École Polytechnique École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine The Seine ( , ) is a river in northern Franc ...

before being one of the first members of the Centre de Mathématiques created there by

Laurent Schwartz Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (; 5 March 1915 – 4 July 2002) was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields Medal in ...

. In 1976 he earned his PhD at the Paris-Sud 11 University, under supervision of Harold Rosenberg. He introduced

Herman ring In the mathematical discipline known as complex dynamics, the Herman ring is a Fatou componentJohn Milnor''Dynamics in one complex variable'' Third Edition, Annals of Mathematics Studies, 160, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006. where the ...

s in 1979. Herman received the

Salem Prize The Salem Prize, in memory of Raphael Salem, is awarded each year to young researchers for outstanding contributions to the field of analysis. It is awarded by the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was fo ...

in 1976. 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 ...

(ICM) in 1978 in Helsinki and the ICM in 1998 in Berlin. Among his students was Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, 1994 Fields Medalist.

References

* * * * * 1942 births 2000 deaths Scientists from New York City French people of American descent 20th-century French mathematicians University of Paris alumni Dynamical systems theorists Members of the French Academy of Sciences École Polytechnique alumni {{France-mathematician-stub