Mathematician Richard Taylor Appointed to Faculty at Institute for Advanced Study

Richard Taylor has been appointed to the Faculty of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, with effect from January 1, 2012. Taylor comes to the Institute from Harvard University, where he is the Herchel Smith Professor of Mathematics.

A leader in number theory, Taylor, with his collaborators, has developed powerful new techniques that they have used to solve important longstanding problems. Taylor has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute since 2010.

“Richard Taylor is one of the world’s leading number theorists,” commented Peter Goddard, Director of the Institute. “His appointment will continue work that has been pioneered at the Institute through the work of eminent mathematicians such as Hermann Weyl, André Weil, Harish Chandra, Robert Langlands and Pierre Deligne. We are delighted that he will be joining our Faculty.”

Peter Sarnak, Professor in the School of Mathematics stated, “Taylor has few equals in terms of solving some of the most difficult problems in mathematics. As a natural leader who has mentored many stellar students and postdoctoral fellows, he will be a valuable addition to the Faculty of the School of Mathematics at the Institute.”

Regarding his appointment, Taylor said, “I am honored, excited and somewhat daunted to join the extraordinary Faculty at the IAS. My visit to the IAS last year was a wonderful, and productive, opportunity for renewal, after several years when my other duties had been allowing less and less time for research. I hope to have the wisdom to continue to benefit myself from the unique environment at the IAS and to help many other mathematicians do the same.”

Richard Taylor took his BA from the University of Cambridge in 1983 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where his adviser was Andrew Wiles, now Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, who has been a Member in the Institute’s School of Mathematics several times since 1981 and a member of the Institute’s Board of Trustees since 2007. Together with Wiles, Taylor developed a fundamental and unexpected new method to show that certain Galois representations correspond to elliptic modular forms. Now known as the Taylor-Wiles method, the pair used it to help complete the proof of Fermat’s last theorem, published in 1995. Taylor went on to apply the method to a series of well-known and difficult problems. For example, together with Fred Diamond, Brian Conrad and Christophe Breuil he resolved completely the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture in the theory of elliptic curves. With Michael Harris, he proved the local Langlands conjecture. More recently, Taylor established the Sato-Tate Conjecture, another longstanding problem in the theory of elliptic curves.

Among his many awards are the 2007 Shaw Prize, shared with Professor Emeritus Robert Langlands; the 2007 Clay Research Award; the Academy of Sciences at Göttingen’s 2005 Dannie Heineman Prize; the American Mathematical Society’s 2002 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory, shared with Henryk Iwaniec, former Member (1983-84, 1986-88, 1999-2000) in the School of Mathematics; the 2001 Fermat Prize, shared with Wendelin Werner; and the 2000 Ostrowski Prize, shared with Iwaniec and Peter Sarnak.

Taylor was a Royal Society European Exchange Fellow at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris in 1988-89. From 1988 to 1995 he was a Fellow of Clare College and successively an Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and Reader in the University of Cambridge. Taylor was a Visiting Assistant Professor at California Institute of Technology in 1992; Visiting Professor at Harvard University in 1994; and Miller Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. In 1995, he was elected to the Savilian Professorship of Geometry in the University of Oxford and a Fellowship of New College. Taylor joined Harvard University as a Professor of Mathematics in 1996 and was named the Herchel Smith Professor of Mathematics in 2002. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of London since 1995.

About the Institute for Advanced Study

The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute exists to encourage and support curiosity-driven research in the sciences and humanities—the original, often speculative thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world. Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science. It provides for the mentoring of scholars by a permanent Faculty of approximately 30, and it ensures the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.

The Institute, founded in 1930, is a private, independent academic institution located in Princeton, New Jersey. Its more than 6,000 former Members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the academic world. Thirty-three Nobel Laureates and 40 out of 56 Fields Medalists, as well as many winners of the Wolf and MacArthur prizes, have been affiliated with the Institute.