Wilfried Schmid

Wilfried Schmid ( born May 28, 1943 in Hamburg ) is a German - American mathematician who deals with representation theory of groups, Hodge theory and automorphic functions.

Schmid grew up in Bonn and was commissioned in 1960 from Germany to the USA. He studied at Princeton University ( BA 1964) and received his doctorate in 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley with Phillip Griffiths. He then taught at the University of Berkeley. In 1970, he received a full professorship at Columbia University. From 1978 he was a professor at Harvard University, at the time as Dwight Parker Robinson Professor for Mathematics.

Schmid dealt with the construction of the discrete series (Discrete Series) - Representations of semisimple Lie groups. He proved a conjecture of Robert Langlands. With Michael Atiyah, he constructed all discrete series representations in the space of harmonic spinors. In 1975 he proved with his student Henryk Hecht a conjecture of Robert Blattner ( Inventiones Mathematicae Bd.31, p.129) on the description of the discrete series representations of a semisimple group by such a maximal compact subgroup. He also dealt with applications of Lie groups theory in complex algebraic geometry, for example, in the description of the period figure of his teacher Phillip Griffiths.

He is also in mathematics education for schools engaged ( after initially in 1999 and publicly complained about the mathematics education of his daughter ), including U.S. government commissions and reformed the mathematics curriculum for schools in Massachusetts. He was also the program committee of the International Congress of Mathematics Education ( 2004).

In 1978 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Helsinki ( Representations of semisimple Lie groups). He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.