Michael Larsen | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Princeton University Harvard University |
| Awards | Putnam Fellow (1981, 1983) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania University of Missouri Indiana University Bloomington |
| Thesis | Unitary groups and L-adic representations (1988) |
| Doctoral advisor | Gerd Faltings |
Michael Jeffrey Larsen is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington.[1][2]
In high school, Larsen tied with four other competitors for the top score in the 1977 International Mathematical Olympiad in Belgrade, winning a gold medal.[3][4] As an undergraduate mathematics student at Harvard University, Larsen became a Putnam Fellow in 1981 and 1983.[5] He graduated from Harvard in 1984,[6] and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988, under the supervision of Gerd Faltings.[7] After working at the Institute for Advanced Study he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, and then moved to the University of Missouri in 1997.[6] He joined the Indiana University faculty in 2001.[1]
His wife Ayelet Lindenstrauss is also a mathematician and Indiana University professor.[8] Their son Daniel at age 13 became the youngest person to publish a crossword in the New York Times.[9]
Larsen is known for his research in arithmetic algebraic geometry, combinatorial group theory, combinatorics, and number theory.[1][2] He has written highly cited papers on domino tiling of Aztec diamonds,[10] topological quantum computing,[11][12] and on the representation theory of braid groups.[13]
In 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to group theory, number theory, topology, and algebraic geometry".[14] He received the E. H. Moore Research Article Prize of the AMS in 2013 (jointly with Richard Pink).
