W. Dale Brownawell

American mathematician

Woodrow Dale Brownawell (born April 21, 1942) is an American mathematician who has performed research in number theory and algebraic geometry. He is a Distinguished Professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University,^[1] and is particularly known for his proof of explicit degree bounds that can be used to turn Hilbert's Nullstellensatz into an effective algorithm.^[2]^[3]

Brownawell was born in Grundy County, Missouri;^[1] his father was a farmer and train inspector.^[2] He earned a double baccalaureate in German and mathematics (with highest distinction) in 1964 from the University of Kansas,^[1] and after studying for a year at the University of Hamburg^[1] (at which he met Eva, the woman he later married)^[2] he returned to the US for graduate study at Cornell University.^[1] His graduate advisor, Stephen Schanuel, moved to Stony Brook University in 1969, and Brownawell followed him there for a year,^[1] but earned his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1970.^[1]^[4] That year, he joined the Penn State faculty, and he remained there until his retirement in 2013.^[1]

Brownawell and Michel Waldschmidt shared the 1986 Hardy–Ramanujan Prize for their independent proofs that at least one of the two numbers $e^{e}$ and $e^{e^{2}}$ is a transcendental number; here $e$ denotes Euler's number, approximately 2.718.^[5] In 2004, a conference at the University of Waterloo was held in honor of Brownawell's 60th birthday.^[6] In 2012, he became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.^[7]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Curriculum vitae, retrieved January 25, 2015.
^ ^a ^b ^c Erem, Suzan (2005), Faces of Penn State, 2005: W. Dale Brownawell, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, Penn State Eberly College of Science, retrieved January 25, 2015.
^ Smale, Stephen (2005), "On problems of computational complexity", Surveys in modern mathematics, London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Ser., vol. 321, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, pp. 255–259, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511614156.012, MR 2166931.
^ W. Dale Brownawell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
^ Waldschmidt, Michel (1998), "On the numbers $e^{e}$ , $e^{e^{2}}$ and $e^{\pi ^{2}}$ ", Hardy-Ramanujan Journal, 21, MR 1680117.
^ The Brownawell Conference, In celebration of the 60th birthday of W.Dale Brownawell, June 17-19, 2004, Fields Institute, retrieved January 25, 2015.
^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved January 25, 2015.