Michael Artin

Michael Artin is an American mathematician, born in Hamburg, Germany, on 28 June 1934 and brought up in Indiana, and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. He is the son of the algebraist Emil Artin. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1955 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1960 under the supervision of Oscar Zariski, defending a thesis about Enriques surfaces. In the early 1960s he contributed to the SGA4 volumes on topos theory and étale cohomology jointly with Alexander Grothendieck, defined étale homotopy theory with Barry Mazur, and proved the Artin approximation theorem, work which gave rise to the ideas of an algebraic space and an algebraic stack. He later turned his interest from algebraic geometry to noncommutative algebra.