MUMFORD, DAVID BRYANT

born June 11, 1937, Worth, Sussex, Eng. British-born mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in algebraic geometry. Mumford attended Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. (B.A., 1957; Ph.D., 1961), staying on to join the faculty upon graduation. He was a MacArthur Fellow (198792) and served as vice president (199194) and president (199598) of the International Mathematical Union. Mumford was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver, B.C., Can., in 1974. As with a number of Fields medalists, Mumford's prizewinning work was in algebraic geometry. In some of his early work Mumford used the theory of invariants, popular in the 19th century, as well as some important ideas of David Hilbert. He continued the efforts of Oscar Zariski in making both algebraic and rigorous the work of the Italian school of algebraic geometers on the subject of algebraic surfaces. He also contributed to the development of an algebraic theory of theta functions. Mumford's publications include Geometric Invariant Theory (1965); Lectures on Curves on an Algebraic Surface (1966); Abelian Varieties (1970); Curves and Their Jacobians (1975); Algebraic Geometry (1976); The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes (1988); and, with Mark Nitzberg and Takahiro Shiota, Filtering, Segmentation, and Depth (1993).