Jerry Lawrence Kazdan (born 31 October 1937 in

Detroit Detroit ( , ) is the List of municipalities in Michigan, most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is situated on the bank of the Detroit River across from Windsor, Ontario. It had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 United State ...

Michigan Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...

) is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

noted for his work in

differential geometry Differential geometry is a Mathematics, mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of Calculus, single variable calculus, vector calculus, lin ...

and the study of

partial differential equation In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which involves a multivariable function and one or more of its partial derivatives. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" that solves the equation, similar to ho ...

s. His contributions include the

Berger–Kazdan comparison theorem In mathematics, Berger's isoembolic inequality is a result in Riemannian geometry that gives a lower bound on the volume of a Riemannian manifold and also gives a necessary and sufficient condition for the manifold to be isometric to the -dimensio ...

, which was a key step in the proof of the Blaschke conjecture and the classification of

Wiedersehen manifold In mathematics—specifically, in Riemannian geometry—a Wiedersehen pair is a pair of distinct points ''x'' and ''y'' on a (usually, but not necessarily, two-dimensional) compact Riemannian manifold (''M'', ''g'') such that every geod ...

s. His best-known work, done in collaboration with Frank Warner, dealt with the problem of prescribing the

scalar curvature In the mathematical field of Riemannian geometry, the scalar curvature (or the Ricci scalar) is a measure of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. To each point on a Riemannian manifold, it assigns a single real number determined by the geometry ...

of a

Riemannian metric In differential geometry, a Riemannian manifold is a geometric space on which many geometric notions such as distance, angles, length, volume, and curvature are defined. Euclidean space, the N-sphere, n-sphere, hyperbolic space, and smooth surf ...

Biography

Kazdan received his bachelor's degree in 1959 from

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (; RPI) is a private university, private research university in Troy, New York, United States. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. It was establishe ...

and his master's degree in 1961 from NYU. He obtained his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1963 from the

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU). Founded in 1935, it is named after Richard Courant, one of the founders of the Courant Institute ...

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

; his thesis was entitled ''A Boundary Value Problem Arising in the Theory of Univalent Functions'' and was supervised by

Paul Garabedian Paul Roesel Garabedian (August 2, 1927May 13, 2010) was a mathematician and numerical analyst. Garabedian was the Director-Division of Computational Fluid Dynamics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He is known ...

. He then took a position as a

Benjamin Peirce Benjamin Peirce (; April 4, 1809 – October 6, 1880) was an American mathematician who taught at Harvard University for approximately 50 years. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, statistics, number theory, algebra, and the philoso ...

Instructor at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. Since 1966, he has been a Professor of Mathematics at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. Dennis DeTurck was a student of his.

Honours

In 1999 he received the

Lester Randolph Ford Award ''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of mathematics. It was established by Benjamin Finkel in 1894 and is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Mathematical Association of America. It is an exposito ...

for his expository article ''Solving equations, an elegant legacy''. In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

Major publications

* DeTurck, Dennis M.; Kazdan, Jerry L. ''Some regularity theorems in Riemannian geometry.'' Ann. Sci. École Norm. Sup. (4) 14 (1981), no. 3, 249–260. * Kazdan, Jerry L.; Warner, F.W. ''Curvature functions for compact 2-manifolds.'' Ann. of Math. (2) 99 (1974), 14–47. * Kazdan, Jerry L.; Warner, F.W. ''Remarks on some quasilinear elliptic equations.'' Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 28 (1975), no. 5, 567–597. * Kazdan, Jerry L.; Warner, F.W. ''Scalar curvature and conformal deformation of Riemannian structure.'' Journal of Differential Geometry 10 (1975), 113–134. * Kazdan, Jerry L.; Warner, F.W. ''Existence and conformal deformation of metrics with prescribed Gaussian and scalar curvatures.'' Ann. of Math. (2) 101 (1975), 317–331.

Books

* ''Lectures on Complex Numbers and Infinite Series'' (1966) * ''Calculus Two: Linear and Nonlinear Functions'' (1971, with Francis J. Flanigan) * ''Intermediate Calculus And Linear Algebra'' (1975) * ''Prescribing the Curvature of a Riemannian Manifold'' (1985)

References

External links