Barry Mazur

Barry Charles Mazur, born on December 19, 1937 in New York City, is an American mathematician and the Gerhard Gade university professor at Harvard University. His contributions include his contributions to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, Mazur's torsion theorem in arithmetic geometry, the Mazur swindle in geometric topology and the Mazur manifold in differential topology. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, left after his junior year to attend MIT, and received his PhD in mathematics at Princeton University in 1959 with a dissertation titled On embeddings of spheres. He was a Junior Fellow at Harvard from 1959 to 1962. His early work was in geometric topology, where he proved the generalized Schoenflies conjecture.