We bid farewell to the American mathematician John Torrence Tate who passed away on October 16, 2019, at the age of 94. Tate received many awards, including the Abel Prize in 2010 "for his vast and lasting impact on the theory of numbers."

Tate studied Physics and graduated from Harvard University in 1946. He then went to Princeton University, initially to continue with physics, but in his first year, he changed to mathematics and did his doctorate with Emil Artin on "Fourier Analysis in Number Fields and Hecke’s Zeta Functions" (Ph.D. 1950). Subsequently, Tate worked as a research assistant and taught at Princeton University (1950 –1953) and as a visiting professor at Columbia University (1953–1954). In 1954 he took up a post as a professor at Harvard University, where he taught and conducted research for the next 36 years. 1990 he went to the University of Texas at Austin where he held a Sid W. Richardson Chair in mathematics until his retirement in 2009.

Tate was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1969), the French Académie des Sciences (1992) and an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society. The mathematical community has lost an outstanding mathematician, who has left a distinctive imprint on modern mathematics.

A video portrait of John Torrence Tate from 2016 on the HLF YouTube channel gives an insight into the life and work of one of the best mathematicians of our times.

Category: HLFF Forum