Robert MacPherson (mathematician)
Robert Duncan MacPherson ( born May 25, 1944 in Lakewood, Ohio) is an American mathematician who is engaged in algebraic geometry.
MacPherson is the son of the nuclear physicist Herbert MacPherson, who is responsible in the Manhattan Project for the boron - free production of high-purity graphite and later deputy director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He earned his bachelor 's degree from Swarthmore College in 1966 and in 1970 received his doctorate at Harvard University in Raoul Bott with the dissertation Singularities of Maps and Characteristic Classes.
In 1970 he was Instructor at Brown University, where in 1972 he was assistant professor and associate professor in 1974. From 1977 to 1987 he was a professor there. 1987 to 1994 he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and from 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he is " Weyl Professor Hermann" since 2007.
As a guest scientist he was, among other 1974/75 and 1980/81 at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques ( IHES ), 1976 /77 at the University of Paris VII, 1980 at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow in 1992 at the Max Planck Institute Mathematics in Bonn, 1991 in Chicago, 1994 in Utrecht and 2000 in Rome ( La Sapienza University ).
He is best known as the inventor (1974 ) of the "Intersection Homology " with his student Mark Goresky, a homology theory for singular spaces, which then in algebraic geometry and beyond - as in representation theory - has been widely used. Goresky earned his doctorate under him in 1976 at the Brown University.
By William Fulton and others, he gave in the 1970s, the theory section of the Italian school of algebraic geometry of the first half of the 20th century a strict basis.
In 1992 he received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics. In 2002 he received the Leroy P. Steele with Goresky Prize of the AMS and the 2009 Heinz Hopf Prize of the ETH Zurich. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He holds an honorary doctorate from Brown University and the University of Lille. In 1983 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Warsaw (Global Questions in the Topology of Singular Spaces ). He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
In 1967 he developed with Coveyou ( a chess champion who worked in Oak Ridge in radiation protection ) a test for random number generators (Journal of the ACM), the Donald Knuth described in his Art of computing known as the best test.
MacPherson was also politically active in the protest movement of 1968 at Harvard against the Vietnam War and later in the Soviet Union. He visited regularly since 1980, the Soviet Union and later Russia and smuggled first mathematical work for publication in the West. From 1990, he smuggled money into the Soviet Union, that he had previously collected during a major fundraiser of the American Mathematical Society, and was personally handed over to mathematicians.
His doctoral include Mark Goresky (his first PhD student ), Kari Vilonen and Yun Zhiwei.
MacPherson was married to the early 1980s and is living with Mark Goresky. In his spare time, he wanders and is riding a bicycle, is amateur chef, opera lover, he that gardens and is also engaged as a carpenter and craftsman. In his college years he studied classical piano ( with a penchant for Johann Sebastian Bach).
Writings (selection )
- Chern classes for singular algebraic varieties. Ann. of Math (2 ) 100 ( 1974), 423-432.
- Homology Intersection: with M. Goresky. I: Topology 19 (1980 ), no 2, 135-162. II: Invent. Math 72 (1983 ), no 1, 77-129.
- With M. Goresky: Stratified Morse theory. Results of mathematics and its applications ( 3), 14 Springer -Verlag, Berlin, 1988. ISBN 3-540-17300-5
- By W. Fulton: A compactification of configuration spaces. Ann. of Math ( 2) 139 (1994 ), no 1, 183-225.
- With M. Goresky, R. Kottwitz: Equivariant cohomology, Koszul duality, and the localization theorem. Invent. Math 131 (1998), no 1, 25-83.