Brian Conrad (b. November 20, 1970, New York City), is an American mathematician and number theorist, working at the University of Michigan. In the Fall of 2008, he will begin a professorship at Stanford 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, while holding a joint postdoctoral position at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Conrad got his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1992, where he won a prize for his undergraduate thesis. He did his doctoral work under Andrew Wiles. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996 with a dissertation entitled Finite Honda Systems And Supersingular Elliptic Curves. He was also featured as an extra in Nova's The Proof. His identical twin brother, Keith Conrad, a professor at the University of Connecticut, and also a number theorist, received his B.S. from Princeton in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1997.
Quotes
"It's quite subtle, actually."
External links
- Homepage at University of Michigan
- On the modularity of elliptic curves over Q - Proof of Taniyama-Shimura coauthored by Conrad.
- Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, Richard Taylor: Modularity of certain potentially Barsotti-Tate Galois representations, Journal of the American Mathematical Society 12 (1999), pp. 521–567. Also contains the proof
- C. Breuil, B. Conrad, F. Diamond et R. Taylor : On the modularity of elliptic curves over Q: wild 3-adic exercices, Journal of the American Mathematical Society 14 (2001), 843-939.
