Bernard Dwork

Bernard Morris Dwork was an American mathematician, born on May 27, 1923, known for his application of p-adic analysis to local zeta functions, and in particular for a proof of the first part of the Weil conjectures, the rationality of the zeta function of a variety over a finite field. The general theme of his research was p-adic cohomology and p-adic differential equations. He studied electrical engineering at the City College of New York and Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, served in the Pacific theater of World War II, and received his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 under the direction of Emil Artin, with John Tate as his formal advisor. He joined Princeton University in 1964, became Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics in 1978 and emeritus in 1993, and received the Cole Prize in 1962 together with Kenkichi Iwasawa. He died in 1998.