John Tate (mathematician)

Tate was born in Minneapolis, on March 13, 1925. His father, John Tate Sr., was a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota and a longtime editor of Physical Review. His mother, Lois Beatrice Fossler, was a high school English teacher. Tate Jr. received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1946 from Harvard University and entered the doctoral program in physics at Princeton University. He later transferred to the mathematics department and received his PhD in mathematics in 1950 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Fourier analysis in number fields and Hecke's zeta functions" under the supervision of Emil Artin. Tate taught at Harvard for 36 years before joining the University of Texas in 1990 as a Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. He retired from the Texas mathematics department in 2009 and returned to Harvard as a professor emeritus. Tate died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts on October 16, 2019, aged 94.