John H. Coates

For other people named John Coates, see John Coates (disambiguation).

John Coates
225px John H. Coates
Born	John Henry Coates (1945-01-26) 26 January 1945 New South Wales, Australia
Residence	Cambridge, England
Nationality	Australian
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Cambridge Harvard University Université de Paris, Orsay École Normale Supérieure Stanford University
Alma mater	Australian National University (BSc) Trinity College, Cambridge (PhD)
Thesis	The Effective Solution of Some Diophantine Equations (1969)
Doctoral advisor	Alan Baker
Doctoral students	Pierre Colmez Matthias Flach Susan Howson Warren Sinnott Jacques Tilouine Anupam Saikia Andrew Wiles
Known for	Iwasawa theory p-adic L-functions
Influences	John Tate
Notable awards	FRS (1985) Senior Whitehead Prize (1997)
Spouse	Julie Turner
Website dpmms.cam.ac.uk/people/jhc13

John Henry Coates, FRS (born 26 January 1945) is a mathematician who was the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom from 1986 to 2012.

Early life and education

Coates was born the son of J. H. Coates and B. L. Lee and grew up in Possum Brush (near Taree) in New South Wales, Australia. Coates Road in Possum Brush is named after the family farm on which he grew up. Before university he spent a summer working for BHP Billiton in Newcastle, New South Wales, though he was not successful in gaining a university scholarship with the company. Coates attended Australian National University on scholarship as one of the first undergraduates, from which he gained a BSc degree. He then moved to France, doing further study at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, before moving again to England.

Career

In England he did postgraduate research at the University of Cambridge, his doctoral dissertation being on p-adic analogues of Baker's method. In 1969, Coates was appointed assistant professor of mathematics at Harvard University in the United States, before moving again in 1972 to Stanford University where he became an associate professor.

In 1975, he returned to England where he was made a fellow of Emmanuel College, and took up a lectureship. Here he supervised the PhD of Andrew Wiles, and together they proved a partial case of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for elliptic curves with complex multiplication.

In 1977, Coates moved back to Australia, becoming a professor at the Australian National University, where he had been an undergraduate. The following year, he moved back to France, taking up a professorship at the University of Paris XI at Orsay. In 1985, he returned to the École Normale Supérieure, this time as professor and director of mathematics.

Since 1986 Coates has worked in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) of the University of Cambridge. In the last ten years he has focused on the study of various aspects of non-commutative Iwasawa theory: for instance, on the study of the arithmetic of elliptic curves in nonabelian infinite extensions.

Awards and honours

Coates was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1985, and was President of the London Mathematical Society from 1988 to 1990. The latter organisation awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1997, for "his fundamental research in number theory and for his many contributions to mathematical life both in the UK and internationally". His nomination for the Royal Society reads:

1. REDIRECT Template:Cquote

• This is a redirect from a page that has been moved (renamed). This page was kept as a redirect to avoid breaking links, both internal and external, that may have been made to the old page name. For more information follow the bold category link.

Personal life

Coates married Julie Turner in 1966, with whom he had three sons. He collects Japanese pottery and porcelain.