Bernard Dwork

Bernard M. Dwork ( born May 27, 1923 in the Bronx, New York City; † 9 May 1998 in New Brunswick) was an American mathematician who worked in the field of number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry.

Life and work

Dwork attended the City College in New York City and the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, where he initially trained as an electrical engineer. He then moved to Columbia University in mathematics and received his PhD in 1954 under the direction of Princeton mathematician Emil Artin and John T. Tate ( On the global root number in the functional equation of the Artin -Weil L- Series). First, he was a tutor and assistant at Harvard (1954-1959), then 1960-1964 at Johns Hopkins University, where he was a full professor in 1961. In 1964 he became a professor at Princeton, where he retired in 1993. 1992 until his death in 1998 he had an honorary professorship in Padua.

Dwork was a pioneer of p- adic analysis. Its use p- adic methods for the study of algebraic varieties over finite fields, culminating in the proof of the rationality of the associated zeta functions, one of the Weil conjectures. For this work he was awarded the 1962 Cole Prize for Algebra.

1961-1963 he was a Sloan Fellow, 1971-1972 Guggenheim Fellow.

Among his doctoral students included Nicholas Katz and Kenneth Ireland.

He was married in 1948 and had three children, daughters Cynthia and Deborah and son Andrew. His daughter Cynthia Dwork is a computer scientist at Microsoft Research, winner of the Dijkstra Prize, and his daughter Deborah Dwork historian of the Holocaust and Guggenheim Fellow.

Dwork, published under the pseudonym Boyarsky, his mother's maiden name.

Writings

• Lectures on p- adic Dwork differential equations, Springer, basic teachings of Mathematical Sciences, 1982
• Idem On the rationality of the zeta function of an algebraic variety, American Journal of Mathematics, Bd.82, 1960, S.631 -648
• With G. Gerotto, FJ Sullivan Introduction to G -functions, Annals of Mathematical Studies, Princeton University Press 1994