Mumford, David

David Mumford, in full David Bryant Mumford, (born June 11, 1937, Worth, Sussex, England), British-born mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in algebraic geometry.

Mumford attended Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. (B.A., 1957; Ph.D., 1961), staying on to join the faculty upon graduation. He served as vice president (1991–94) and president (1995–98) of the International Mathematical Union. In 1996 he joined the faculty at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, becoming professor emeritus in 2007.

Mumford was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1974. As with a number of Fields Medalists, Mumford’s prizewinning work was in algebraic geometry. In some of his early work, Mumford took up David Hilbert’s theory of invariants and applied it to new geometric problems couched in Alexandre Grothendieck’s theory of schemes. He continued the efforts of Oscar Zariski in making both algebraic and rigorous the work of the Italian school of algebraic geometers on the subject of algebraic surfaces. He was influential in bringing Grothendieck’s ideas to the United States, where they prospered. He also contributed to the development of an algebraic theory of theta functions. Mumford later researched the mathematics of computer vision.

Mumford’s publications included Geometric Invariant Theory (1965) and Algebraic Geometry (1976). In addition to the Fields Medal, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2008; shared with Pierre Deligne and Phillip Griffiths) and the National Medal of Science (2010).