Jacob Lurie
Institute for Advanced Study
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Primary Section: 11, Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
Jacob Lurie is an American mathematician working in homotopy theory and algebraic geometry. Lurie was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. He graduated from Harvard College with a BA in mathematics in 2000. In 2004, he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT, writing his thesis under the direction of Michael Hopkins. He became an associate professor at MIT in 2007, before joining the faculty of the Harvard mathematics department in 2009. In 2014, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Since 2019, he has been a permanent faculty member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Research Interests
Jacob Lurie's research is focused on the interface between homotopy theory and algebraic geometry. He is best known for his work on the foundations of algebraic topology and higher category theory, and is primarily interested in the applications of these ideas to adjacent areas of mathematics. His Ph.D. thesis was concerned with the emerging theory of derived algebraic geometry, which applies ideas from homotopy theory to study systems of polynomial equations (particularly in the cases where those equations are redundant or overdetermined). He has made several contributions to the development of chromatic stable homotopy theory, particularly to the study of elliptic cohomology (using ideas from derived algebraic geometry to give a moduli-theoretic interpretation of the theory of topological modular forms). Other research interests include topological quantum field theory, factorization homology, and their applications (including number-theoretic applications, developed in joint work with Dennis Gaitsgory).
