Biosketch
Richard Taylor was born in Cambridge, England in 1962 and grew up in Oxford, England. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1983 with a BA in mathematics and from Princeton University in 1988 with a PhD in algebraic number theory. Following a post-doctoral year at the IHES outside Paris he taught at Cambridge University 1989-95, Oxford University 1995-96 and Harvard University 1996-2012. Since 2012 he has been a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society.
Research Interests
Richard Taylor is interested in the partly conjectural correspondence between Galois representations and automorphic forms. Whenever this dictionary, often called the Langlands correspondence, can be proved it provides an extremely powerful tool to answer questions about automorphic forms, Galois theory and L-functions. Taylor helped Wiles complete the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and, with Breuil, Conrad and Diamond, went on to prove the full Shimura-Taniyama conjecture. With Harris he prove the local Langlands conjecture for GL(n) and established its compatibility with known instances of the global correspondence.
With Clozel, Harris and Shepherd-Barron he proved the Sato-Tate conjecture. Extending this method, together with Barnet-Lamb, Gee, Geraghty and Patrikis he proved the potential automorphy of all regular, self-dual motives, and hence established the meromorphic continuation of their L-functions. With Harris, Lan and Thorne he constructed Galois representations associated to all regular algebraic automorphic forms over CM fields.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
2015
Primary Section
Section 11: Mathematics