Professor Don Bernard Zagier

From 2006 to 2014 he was professor at the Collège de France in Paris, France. Since October 2014 he has also been a Distinguished Staff Associate at the ICTP. Don Bernard Zagier is currently the director of the Max Planck Institute of Mathematics in Bonn, Germany.

Prof. Zagier was born in 1951 in Heidelberg, Germany. He wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Friedrich Hirzebruch in Bonn, obtaining his doctorate at the age of 20. He received his habilitation at the age of 23 and was appointed professor at the age of 24.

Prof. Zagier worked with Hirzebruch on the development of Hilbert modular surfaces. One of his achievements is working together with Benedict Gross (the so-called Gross-Zagier formula). Zagier collaborated with John Harer in calculating the orbifold Euler characteristics of moduli spaces of algebraic curves, relating them to the special values of Riemann zeta functions. He discovered a short and elementary proof of Fermat's theorem on the sums of two squares.

Zagier received the Cole Prize in number theory in 1987, the von Staudt Prize in 2001 and the Gauss Lectureship of the German Mathematical Society in 2007. In 1997 he became a foreign member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science and Arts and in 2017 a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Prof. Zagier visited the Warsaw University of Technology at the invitation of the Director of the CAS Prof. Stanisław Janeczko in September 2018. On 20th of September he gave a lecture entitled "Two problems related to Riemann's hypothesis" at the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science of the Warsaw University of Technology.