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American mathematician (born 1944) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ralph Greenberg (born 1944) is an American mathematician who has made contributions to number theory, in particular Iwasawa theory.
Ralph Greenberg | |
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Born | 1944 (age 79–80) |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania Princeton University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Washington |
Doctoral advisor | Kenkichi Iwasawa |
He was born in Chester, Pennsylvania[1] and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a B.A. in 1966,[1] after which he attended Princeton University, earning his doctorate in 1971 under the supervision of Kenkichi Iwasawa.[2]
Greenberg's results include a proof (joint with Glenn Stevens) of the Mazur–Tate–Teitelbaum conjecture as well as a formula for the derivative of a p-adic Dirichlet L-function at (joint with Bruce Ferrero). Greenberg is also well known for his many conjectures. In his PhD thesis, he conjectured that the Iwasawa μ- and λ-invariants of the cyclotomic -extension of a totally real field are zero, a conjecture that remains open as of September 2012. In the 1980s, he introduced the notion of a Selmer group for a p-adic Galois representation and generalized the "main conjectures" of Iwasawa and Barry Mazur to this setting. He has since generalized this setup to present Iwasawa theory as the theory of p-adic deformations of motives. He also provided an arithmetic theory of L-invariants generalizing his aforementioned work with Stevens.
Greenberg was an invited speaker in International Congress of Mathematicians 2010, Hyderabad on the topic of "Number Theory."[3]
In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[4]
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Greenberg publicly disputed NASA conspiracy theorist and pseudoscientist Richard C. Hoagland's mathematical interpretations of the so-called "D&M Pyramid" and surrounding features found on the Cydonia Planitia region of Mars as being conclusive signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and challenged him to a public debate. Hoagland has yet to respond.[5]
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