David Mumford

David Bryant Mumford is an American mathematician, born in Worth, West Sussex, England, on 11 June 1937, known for his work in algebraic geometry and then for research into vision and pattern theory. He studied at Harvard University, where he became a student of Oscar Zariski and a Putnam Fellow in 1955 and 1956, and completed his PhD in 1961 with a thesis entitled Existence of the moduli scheme for curves of any genus. His work on moduli spaces combined traditional geometric insight with contemporary algebraic techniques and is summed up in his book Geometric Invariant Theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1974, the Wolf Prize in 2008 and the National Medal of Science in 2010, and was a MacArthur Fellow. After a career at Harvard he moved to Brown University in 1996, concentrating on applied mathematics, and is now a university professor emeritus there.