Wolfgang M. Schmidt

Who is Wolfgang M. Schmidt?

Wolfgang M. Schmidt is a mathematician born in 1933. He studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, where he received his PhD, which was supervised by Edmund Hlawka, in 1955. Wolfgang Schmidt is professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences.

He was awarded the eighth Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory for work on Diophantine approximation. He is known for his subspace theorem.

In 1960, he proved that every normal number in base r is normal in base s if and only if log r / log s is a rational number. He also proved the existence of T numbers. His series of papers on irregularities of distribution contained landmark results; see J.Beck and W.Chen, Irregularities of Distribution, Cambridge University Press, for more information. Schmidt is in a small group of number theorists who have been invited to address the International Congress of Mathematicians three times. The others are Iwaniec, Shimura, and Tate.

In 1986, Schmidt received the Humboldt Research Award and in 2003, he received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. Schmidt holds honorary doctorates from the University of Ulm, the Sorbonne, the University of Waterloo and the University of Marburg. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.