Michael Artin

Artin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana. His parents were Natalia Naumovna Jasny (Natascha) and Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20th century of Armenian descent. Artin's parents left Germany in 1937, because his mother's father was Jewish. His elder sister is Karin Tate, who was married to mathematician John Tate until the late 1980s. Artin did his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, receiving an A.B. in 1955. He then moved to Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of Oscar Zariski, defending a thesis about Enriques surfaces. In the early 1960s, Artin spent time at the IHÉS in France, contributing to the SGA4 volumes of the Séminaire de géométrie algébrique, on topos theory and étale cohomology, jointly with Alexander Grothendieck. He also collaborated with Barry Mazur to define étale homotopy theory which has become an important tool in algebraic geometry, and applied ideas from algebraic geometry (such as the Nash equilibrium) to the study of diffeomorphisms of compact manifolds. His work on the problem of characterising the representable functors in the category of schemes has led to the Artin approximation theorem in local algebra as well as the "Existence theorem".