David A. Cox

David Archibald Cox ( born September 23, 1948 in Washington DC) is an American mathematician who deals with algebraic geometry.

Cox studied at Rice University with a bachelor's degree in 1970 and in 1975 received his doctorate from Princeton University with Eric Friedlander ( Tubular Neighborhoods in the etale topology ). 1974/75 he was Assistant Professor at Haverford College and from 1975 to 1979 at Rutgers University. In 1979 he became assistant professor in 1988 and professor at Amherst College.

It dealt among other things with etale homotopy elliptic surfaces, computer-aided algebraic geometry ( such as Gröbner bases), Torelli sets and toric varieties, Number theory and history of mathematics. He is known for several textbooks. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

1987/88 he was a visiting Professor at Oklahoma State University. In 2012 he was awarded the Lester Randolph Ford Award for Why Eisenstein Proved the Eisenstein Criterion and Why Schönemann Discovered It First.

Writings

• With John Little, Donal O'Shea, Ideals, varieties, and algorithms: an introduction to computational algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, 3rd edition, Springer Verlag 2007
• Using algebraic geometry, 2nd edition, Springer Verlag 2005
• With Sheldon Katz: Mirror Symmetry and Algebraic Geometry, American Mathematical Society 1999
• Galois Theory, Wiley / Interscience 2004
• With Bernd Sturmfels, Dinesh Manocha (Eds. ) Applications of computational algebraic geometry, American Mathematical Society 1998
• Primes of the form: Fermat, class field theory, and complex multiplication, Wiley 1989
• With John Little, Henry Schenck: Toric Varieties, American Mathematical Society 2011
• Contributions to Ernst Kunz Residues and duality for projective algebraic varieties, American Mathematical Society 2008