Biography:Michael McQuillan (mathematician)

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Short description: Scottish mathematician
Michael Liam McQuillan
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
EducationPh.D., Harvard University, 1992
Occupationmathematician

Michael Liam McQuillan is a Scottish mathematician studying algebraic geometry. As of 2019 he is Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

Career

Michael McQuillan received the doctorate in 1992 at Harvard University under Barry Mazur ("Division points on semi-Abelian varieties").[1][2]

In 1995, McQuillan proved the Mordell–Lang conjecture.[3] In 1996, MacQuillan gave a new proof of a conjecture of André Bloch (1926) about holomorphic curves in closed subvarieties of Abelian varieties,[4] proved a conjecture of Shoshichi Kobayashi (about the Kobayashi-hyperbolicity of generic hypersurfaces of high degree in projective n-dimensional space) in the three-dimensional case[5] and achieved partial results on a conjecture of Mark Green and Phillip Griffiths (which states that a holomorphic curve on an algebraic surface of general type with [math]\displaystyle{ c_{1}^2 \gt c_2 }[/math] cannot be Zariski-dense).[6]

From 1996 to 2001 he was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College of the University of Oxford[7][8] and in 2009 was Professor at the University of Glasgow as well as Advanced Research Fellow of the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. As of 2019 he is Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and an editor of the European Journal of Mathematics.[9]

Awards

In 2000 McQuillan received the EMS Prize, which was announced from the European Congress of Mathematics in July 2000, for his work:

Michael McQuillan has created the method of dynamic diophantine approximation, which has led to a series of remarkable results in complex geometry of algebraic varieties. Among these results one can mention a new proof of Bloch’s conjecture on holomorphic curves in closed subvarieties of abelian varieties, the proof of the conjecture of Green and Griffiths that a holomorphic curve in a surface of general type cannot be Zariski-dense, and the hyperbolicity of generic hypersurfaces of high degree in projective 3-space (the Kobayashi conjecture).[10]

In 2001 he was awarded the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society.[11] In 2002 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing (Integrating [math]\displaystyle{ \partial \bar{\partial} }[/math]). In 2001 he received the Whittaker Prize.

References

  1. "Harvard Department of Mathematics PhD Dissertations Archival Listing". Harvard University. https://www.math.harvard.edu/graduate/dissertations/. 
  2. Michael McQuillan at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. McQuillan, Michael (1995-12-01). "Division points on semi-abelian varieties" (in en). Inventiones mathematicae 120 (1): 143–159. doi:10.1007/BF01241125. ISSN 1432-1297. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01241125. 
  4. McQuillan, Michael Liam (1996). "A new proof of the Bloch conjecture". Journal of Algebraic Geometry 5 (1): 107–117.  Bloch's proof was incomplete. Ochiai proved special cases. The first proof was by Mark Green, who presented a further proof with Phillip Griffiths in 1979.
  5. McQuillan, Michael Liam (1999). "Holomorphic curves on hyperplane sections of 3-folds". Geometric and Functional Analysis 9 (2): 370–392. doi:10.1007/s000390050091.  At about the same time Jean-Pierre Demailly and J. El-Goul also achieved similar results.
  6. McQuillan, Michael Liam (1998). "Diophantine approximations and foliations". Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS 87: 121–174. doi:10.1007/BF02698862. http://www.numdam.org/item?id=PMIHES_1998__87__121_0. 
  7. "Dr Michael McQuillan". All Souls College. https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/220. 
  8. "All Souls College: Mathematics". All Souls College. https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/research/8. 
  9. "European Journal of Mathematics: Editors". Springer. https://www.springer.com/journal/40879/editors. 
  10. "Mathematics People (excerpt from Notices)". American Mathematical Society. 2000. https://www.ams.org/notices/200009/people.pdf. 
  11. "Citation for Michael McQuillan (Laudatio for the Whitehead Prize)". London Mathematical Society. 2001-07-02. http://www.lms.ac.uk/activities/prizes_com/citations01/mcquillan.html.