Alan Baker

Alan Baker was an English mathematician, known for his work on effective methods in number theory, in particular those arising from transcendental number theory. He was born into a Jewish family in London on 19 August 1939 and was a student of Harold Davenport at University College London and later at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his PhD. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970 at the age of 31 while a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge University from 1974 until he became an emeritus in 2006, and a fellow of Trinity College from 1964 until his death on 4 February 2018. His interests were in transcendence, linear forms in logarithms, Diophantine geometry and Diophantine analysis, and he generalised the Gelfond-Schneider theorem.