Don Zagier

Don Bernard Zagier is a German mathematician, born in Heidelberg on 29 June 1951, whose main area of work is number theory. After finishing high school at age 13 he studied at MIT, completing his bachelor's and master's degrees and being named a Putnam Fellow in 1967, and then wrote a doctoral dissertation on characteristic classes under Friedrich Hirzebruch at Bonn, receiving his PhD at 20. He is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn and was a professor at the Collège de France from 2006 to 2014. With Benedict Gross he proved the Gross-Zagier formula, which relates the derivative of the L-series of an elliptic curve to the height of a Heegner point, and he found a short elementary proof of Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares. His doctoral students include the Fields medalists Maxim Kontsevich and Maryna Viazovska.