John Tate (mathematician)

Tate died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on October 16, 2019, at the age of 94.

In 2010, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, of which he was a member, awarded him the Abel Prize, citing "his vast and lasting impact on the theory of numbers". According to a release by the Abel Prize committee, "Many of the major lines of research in algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry are only possible because of the incisive contributions and illuminating insights of John Tate. He has truly left a conspicuous imprint on modern mathematics."

In 1956 Tate was awarded the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize for outstanding contributions to number theory. In 1992 he was elected as Foreign Member of the French Academie des Sciences. In 1995 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the American Mathematical Society. He was awarded a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2002/03 for his creation of fundamental concepts in algebraic number theory. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Tate's thesis (1950) on Fourier analysis in number fields has become one of the ingredients for the modern theory of automorphic forms and their L-functions, notably by its use of the adele ring, its self-duality and harmonic analysis on it; independently and a little earlier, Kenkichi Iwasawa obtained a similar theory. Together with his teacher Emil Artin, Tate gave a cohomological treatment of global class field theory, using techniques of group cohomology applied to the idele class group and Galois cohomology. This treatment made more transparent some of the algebraic structures in the previous approaches to class field theory, which used central division algebras to compute the Brauer group of a global field.

Tate was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, John Tate Sr., was a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, and a longtime editor of Physical Review. His mother, Lois Beatrice Fossler, was a high school English teacher. Tate Jr. received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1946 from Harvard University, and entered the doctoral program in physics at Princeton University. He later transferred to the mathematics department and received his PhD in mathematics in 1950 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Fourier analysis in number fields and Hecke's zeta functions", under the supervision of Emil Artin. Tate taught at Harvard for 36 years before joining the University of Texas in 1990 as a Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. He retired from the Texas mathematics department in 2009, and returned to Harvard as a professor emeritus.

John Torrence Tate Jr. (March 13, 1925 – October 16, 2019) was an American mathematician, distinguished for many fundamental contributions in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry and related areas in algebraic geometry. He was awarded the Abel Prize in 2010.