- Peter Woit
Peter Woit is a mathematical physicist at Columbia University. He obtained his PhD in particle theory from Princeton University in 1985, followed by postdoctoral work in theoretical physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook and mathematics at MSRI in Berkeley. He spent four years as an assistant professor at Columbia and now holds a permanent position as "Lecturer in Discipline" in the mathematics department where he runs the computer system, teaches classes, …
- Edward Kasner
Edward Kasner, (City College of New York 1897; Columbia University M.A., 1897; Columbia University Ph.D., 1900), who studied under Cassius Jackson Keyser, was a prominent Jewish American mathematician who was appointed Tutor on Mathematics in the Columbia University Mathematics Department. Kasner was the first Jew appointed to a faculty position in the sciences at Columbia University.
- Richard Hamilton
Richard Streit Hamilton is professor of mathematics at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 1966 from Princeton University. Robert Gunning supervised his thesis. Hamilton has taught at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and Cornell University. Hamilton is best known for having invented the Ricci flow, which Grigori Perelman employed in his proof of the Thurston geometrization conjecture and the Poincaré conjecture.
- John Morgan
John Willard Morgan is an American mathematician, well-known for his contributions to topology and geometry. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Department at Columbia University.
- Serge Lang
Serge Lang was a French-born American mathematician. He was known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the influential "Algebra". He was a member of the Bourbaki group. He was born in Paris in 1927, and moved with his family to California as a teenager, where he graduated in 1943 from Beverly Hills High School. He subsequently graduated from Caltech in 1946, and received a doctorate from Princeton University in 1951.
- John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it. The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.
- Ralph Abraham
Ralph H. Abraham (b. July 4 1936, Burlington, Vermont) is an American mathematician. He has been a member of the mathematics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz since 1968. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1960, and held positions at Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. He has also held visiting positions in Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, and Florence.
- Hyman Bass
Hyman Bass (b. 1932) is an American mathematician, known for work in algebra. From 1959-1998 he was Professor in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University. He is currently the Roger Lyndon Collegiate Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Michigan.
- Samuel Eilenberg
Samuel Eilenberg was a Polish mathematician. He was born in Warsaw, Russian Empire (now Poland) and died in New York, USA where he had spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University. He earned his Ph.D. from Warsaw University in 1936. His thesis advisor was Karol Borsuk. His main interest was algebraic topology. He worked on the axiomatic treatment of homology theory with Norman Steenrod (whose names the Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms bear), …
- Leon M. Lederman
Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922 in New York) is an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for his work on neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998.
- Apostolos Doxiadis
Apostolos Doxiadis (b. 1953 in Brisbane, Queensland in Australia) and raised in Greece is a Greek writer. In his earliest years he was drawn to mathematics. At age 15 in 1968, he attended Columbia University in New York City. He later attended École Pratique des Hautes Études, literally the Practical School of Higher Studies, in Paris where he studied mathematical models for the nervous system.
- Enrico Bombieri
Enrico Bombieri is an Italian mathematician, born in Milan. He is now at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is known for work in number theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical analysis. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1974. The Bombieri–Vinogradov theorem is one of the major applications of the large sieve method. It improves Dirichlet's theorem on prime numbers in arithmetic progressions, by showing that by averaging over the modulus over a range, …
- Joan Birman
Joan Birman (born 1927) is an American topologist, specializing in braids and knot theory. Her book "Braids, Links, and Mapping Class Groups" has become a standard introduction, with many of today's researchers having learned the subject through it. Birman is currently Research Professor Emeritus at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.
- Noam Elkies
Noam D. Elkies (born 1966 in New York City) is a mathematician. While an undergraduate at Columbia University, he was a three-time Putnam Fellow. He won the 1982 competition at the age of sixteen years and four months, making him possibly the youngest Putnam Fellow in history. After graduating as valedictorian, he earned his Ph.D. under supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.
- Lipman Bers
Lipman Bers (May 22, 1914, Riga, Latvia – October 29, 1993, New Rochelle, New York) was an American mathematician who worked on Riemann surfaces. Bers received his Ph.D. in 1938 from the University of Prague. His advisor was Charles Loewner. He worked at Syracuse University (1945-1951), New York University (1951-1964) and at Columbia University (1964-1982). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Finnish Academy of Sciences, …
- William Lawvere
Francis William Lawvere is a mathematician known for his work in category theory, topos theory and the philosophy of mathematics. Lawvere completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Columbia University in 1963, under the supervision of Samuel Eilenberg, a founder of category theory. He first taught at the University of Chicago, where he was a colleague of the other founder of category theory, Saunders Mac Lane. Lawvere then spent most of his career at University at Buffalo, …
- Tobias Dantzig
Tobias Dantzig was a Russian American mathematician, the father of George Dantzig, and the author of "NUMBER: The Language of Science". Born in Latvia, Dantzig studied mathematics with Henri Poincaré in Paris. Tobias married a fellow Sorbonne University student, Anja Ourisson, and the couple emigrated to the United States in 1910. Working for a time as a lumberjack in Oregon, Dantzig received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Indiana University in 1916.
- Frank Nelson Cole
Frank Nelson Cole, Ph. D. was an American mathematician, born at Ashland, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, where he lectured on mathematics from 1885 to 1887. Later, he was employed at the University of Michigan and Columbia University. Professor Cole became secretary of the American Mathematical Society in 1895 and an editor of its "Bulletin" in 1897.
- James Glimm
James Gilbert Glimm is an American mathematical physicist, and Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1959; his advisor was Richard Kadison. He has been noted for contributions to C*-algebras, quantum field theory, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, scientific computing, the modeling of petroleum reservoirs, and geometric models for structural biology.
- Herbert Aaron Hauptman
Herbert A. Hauptman , Ph.D. President, Nobel Laureate Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
- Huai-Dong Cao
Huai-Dong Cao is A. Everett Pitcher Professor of Mathematics in Lehigh University. He collaborated with Xi-Ping Zhu of Zhongshan University in verifying Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture. The Cao-Zhu team is one of three teams formed for this purpose.
- Dave Bayer
Dave Bayer is an American mathematician. He is currently a professor of mathematics at Barnard College, Columbia University. He was math consultant for the film "A Beautiful Mind", and also acted in it as one of the "Pen Ceremony" professors. He is also one of few people to have both Erdős number and Bacon number.
- Linda Keen
Linda Jo Goldway Keen (born 9 August 1940 in New York City, New York) is a mathematician. After receiving her BS degree from the City College of New York, she studied at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and earned her PhD in 1964. She wrote her thesis on Riemann surfaces under the direction of Lipman Bers at NYU. In addition to studying Riemann surfaces, Keen has worked in hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian groups and Fuchsian groups, complex analysis, …
- Brian Conrad
Brian Conrad (b. November 20, 1970, New York City), is an American mathematician and number theorist, working at the University of Michigan, but currently a visiting professor at Columbia University. Conrad's most famous accomplishment is his work on proving the modularity theorem, also known as the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. He proved this in 1999 with Christophe Breuil, Fred Diamond and Richard Taylor, …
- Zvi Galil
Zvi Galil is the President of Tel Aviv University and the former dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University and served as the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Mathematical Methods and Computer Science. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, he was elected for his contributions to the design and analysis of algorithms and for leadership in computer science and engineering.
- Ciprian Manolescu
Ciprian Manolescu (b. December 24, 1978 in Alexandria, Romania) is presently an Assistant Professor and a Clay Research Fellow in the mathematics department at Columbia University. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University under the direction of Peter B. Kronheimer. His thesis topic was "A spectrum valued TQFT from the Seiberg-Witten equations". His research interests span the areas of gauge theory, symplectic geometry, algebraic topology, …
- Leo Breiman
Leo Breiman was a distinguished statistician at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and was a member of the United States National Academy of Science. Breiman's work bridged the gap between statisticians and computer scientists, particularly in the field of machine learning. Perhaps his most important contributions were his work on classification and regression trees and ensembles of trees fit to bootstrap samples.
- Vladimir Vapnik
Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is one of the main developers of Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory. He was born in the Soviet Union; received a master's degree in mathematics from the Uzbek State University in Samarkand (now Uzbekistan), in 1958; and received a Ph.D in statistics from the Institute of Control Science in Moscow in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 until 1990, and became Head of the Computer Science Research Department.
- Louis Charles Karpinski
Louis Charles Karpinski was an American mathematician born in Rochester, New York, and educated at Cornell University and in Europe at Strassburg. He also studied (1909–1910) at Columbia, where he was a fellow and a university extension lecturer. He taught at Berea and at Oswego, New York at the Normal School there, then accepted a position at Michigan where in 1919 he became full professor of mathematics. Dr.
- Abraham Adrian Albert
Abraham Adrian Albert (November 9, 1905 - June 6, 1972) was a mathematician of Russian ancestry. A first generation American, he was born in Chicago and most associated with that city. He received his BS in 1926, Master's in 1927, and PhD in 1928(at the age of 22), all from the University of Chicago. Around this time he got married. He spent his postdoctoral year at Princeton University and then from 1929 to 1931 he was an instructor at Columbia University.
- James Cooley
Dr. James Cooley (born 1926) is an American mathematician. James William Cooley received a B.A. degree in 1949 from Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, an M.A. degree in 1951 from Columbia University, New York, NY, and a Ph.D. degree in 1961 in applied mathematics from Columbia University. He was a programmer on John von Neumann's computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, from 1953 to 1956. He worked on quantum mechanical computations at the Courant Institute, …
- Rudolf Kalman
Rudolf Emil Kálmán is an American-Hungarian mathematical system theorist, who is an electrical engineer by training. He is most famous for his co-invention of the Kalman filter, a mathematical technique widely used in control systems and avionics to extract a signal from a series of incomplete and noisy measurements. Kálmán's ideas on filtering were initially met with scepticism, …
- Bernard Dwork
Bernard Morris Dwork (May 271923 - May 91998) was an American mathematician, known for his application of p-adic analysis to local zeta functions, and in particular for the first general results on the Weil conjectures. Together with Kenkichi Iwasawa he received the Cole Prize in 1962. Dwork received his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 under direction of Emil Artin. Nick Katz was one of his students.
- Carl Benjamin Boyer
Carl Benjamin Boyer was a historian of mathematics. He wrote the books "History of Analytic Geometry", "History of the Calculus", "A History of Mathematics", and "The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics". He married the former Marjorie Duncan Nice. He was a 1954 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow. He died of a heart attack in New York.
- Winifred Edgerton Merrill
Winifred Edgerton, born in Ripon, Wisconsin, was the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. She earned her B.A. degree from Wellesley College in 1883. She attended Columbia University in New York after a short stay at Harvard. She was awarded the PhD, with high honors, by a unanimous vote of the board of trustees in 1886 after being rejected once.
- William Kruskal
William Henry Kruskal was an American mathematician and statistician. He is best known for having formulated the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance (together with W. Allen Wallis), a widely-used nonparametric statistical method. Kruskal was born in New York City to a successful fur wholesaler. His mother, Lillian Rose Vorhaus Kruskal Oppenheimer, became a noted promoter of Origami during the early era of television.
- Leonard Jimmie Savage
Leonard Jimmie Savage was a US mathematician and statistician. He was graduated from the University of Michigan and later worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the University of Chicago, and the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University. Though his thesis advisor was Sumner Myers, he also credited Milton Friedman and W. Allen Wallis as his statistical mentors. His most noted work was the 1954 book "Foundations of Statistics", …
- Joseph L. Fleiss
Joseph L. Fleiss was a professor of biostatistics at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where he also served as head of the Division of Biostatistics from 1975 to 1992. He is known for his work in mental health statistics, particularly assessing the reliability of diagnostic classifications, and the measures, models, and control of errors in categorization.
- Ida Rhodes
Ida Rhodes (15 may, 1900 - 1 February 1986) was a mathematician who became a member of the clique of influential women at the heart of early computer development in the United States. Rhodes (birth name Hadassah Itzkowitz) was born in 1900 in the Ukraine. She came to the United States in 1913 and was studying math at Cornell University only six years later. She received her BA in mathematics in February, 1923 and her MA in September of the same year, …
- Thomas Fiske
Thomas Scott Fiske was an American mathematician. He was born in New York City and graduated in 1885 (Ph.D., 1888) from Columbia University, where he was a fellow, assistant, tutor, instructor, and adjunct professor until 1897, when he became professor of mathematics. In 1899 he was acting dean of Barnard College. He was president in 1902-04 of the American Mathematical Society, …