Don Zagier

Don Zagier

Don Bernhard Zagier (born 1951) is an American mathematician whose main area of work is number theory. He is currently one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, France.

He was born in Heidelberg, Germany. He grew up in the United States, finishing high school at the age of 13, and studied for three years at M.I.T., completing his bachelor's and master's degree and being named a Putnam Fellow in 1967 at the age of 16. He then wrote a doctoral dissertation on characteristic classes under Friedrich Hirzebruch at Oxford, graduating at 21, and later collaborated with Hirzebruch in work on Hilbert modular surfaces.

One of his most famous results is a joint work with Benedict Gross (the so-called Gross-Zagier formula). This formula relates the first derivative of the complex L-series of an elliptic curve evaluated at 1 to the height of a certain Heegner point. This extremely important theorem has many applications including implying cases of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture along with being a key ingredient to Dorian Goldfeld's proof of the class number problem.

He also is known for discovering a short and elementary proof of Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares [1][2].

He won the Cole Prize in 1987.