Richard Swan

Richard Gordon Swan is an American mathematician, born in 1933, who is known for the Serre-Swan theorem, which relates vector bundles to projective modules, and for the Swan representation, an l-adic projective representation of a Galois group. His work lies mainly in algebraic K-theory. As a Princeton undergraduate he was one of five winners of the 1952 Putnam Competition, and he earned his Ph.D. there in 1957 under John Coleman Moore. He proved the Stallings-Swan theorem in full generality in 1969 and, with Otto Forster, the Forster-Swan theorem. He is Louis Block Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, where his doctoral students include Charles Weibel, and he received the Cole Prize in Algebra of the American Mathematical Society in 1970.