Paul Monsky

Who is Paul Monsky?

Paul Monsky is an American mathematician and professor at Brandeis University.

After earning a Bachelors degree from Swarthmore College, he received his Ph. D. in 1962 from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Walter Bailey. He has introduced the Monsky-Washnitzer cohomology and he has worked intensively on Hilbert-Kunz functions and Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity. In 2007, Monsky and Brenner gave an example showing that tight closure does not commute with localization.

Monsky's theorem, the statement that a square cannot be divided into an odd number of equal-area triangles, is named after Monsky, who published the first proof of it in 1970.

In the mid-1970s, Monsky stopped paying U.S. federal income tax in protest against military spending. He resisted income tax withholding by claiming extra exemptions, and this led to a criminal conviction on tax charges in 1980.