Brian Conrad

Brian Conrad (b. November 20, 1970, New York City), is an American mathematician and number theorist, working at Stanford University. Previously he was at the University of Michigan.

Conrad's most famous accomplishment is his work on proving the modularity theorem, also known as the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. He proved this in 1999 with Christophe Breuil, Fred Diamond and Richard Taylor, while holding a joint postdoctoral position at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Conrad got his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1992, where he won a prize for his undergraduate thesis. He did his doctoral work under Andrew Wiles. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996 with a dissertation entitled "Finite Honda Systems And Supersingular Elliptic Curves". He was also featured as an extra in Nova's "The Proof".

His identical twin brother, Keith Conrad, a professor at the University of Connecticut, and also a number theorist, received his B.S. from Princeton in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1997.

External links

* [http://math.stanford.edu/~conrad/ Homepage at Stanford University]
* [http://abel.math.harvard.edu/~rtaylor/st.ps "On the modularity of elliptic curves over Q"] - Proof of Taniyama-Shimura coauthored by Conrad.
* Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, Richard Taylor: [http://abel.math.harvard.edu/~rtaylor/cdt.dvi "Modularity of certain potentially Barsotti-Tate Galois representations"] , Journal of the American Mathematical Society 12 (1999), pp. 521–567. Also contains the proof
* C. Breuil, B. Conrad, F. Diamond et R. Taylor : [http://www.ihes.fr/~breuil/PUBLICATIONS/STW.pdf "On the modularity of elliptic curves over Q: wild 3-adic exercices"] , Journal of the American Mathematical Society 14 (2001), 843-939.