Robert F. Coleman

JOB TITLE: Professor Emeritus

UC In Memoriam biography

We are very sad to report the sudden death of Professor Robert Coleman in the early morning on March 24, 2014, just a few months after his retirement and a few months short of his sixtieth birthday.

Professor Coleman was born in Glen Cove, New York in 1954. He received an A.B. from Harvard in 1976 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1979;  he joined our department in 1983.  His ground-breaking work in number theory, based primarily on his unique insight into p-adic geometry, transformed the field.  He is especially known for his theory of p-adic integration (the “Coleman integral”) and his construction, with Barry Mazur, of the eigencurve, a richly complicated p-adic space which glues together families of modular forms and Galois representations.  He is the author of 63 publications and had thirteen students and fifteen mathematical descendants. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1987.

Professor Coleman fought multiple sclerosis with great bravery for 29 years, never giving up his dedication to research in and teaching of mathematics, or his good humor and engagement with friends, colleagues, and the natural world.

PRIMARY RESEARCH AREA: Algebra

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Arithmetic geometry

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: 

  1. Coleman, Robert and McMurdy, Ken (2006). Fake CM and the stable model of X_0(Np^3). Doc. Math. No.Extra Vol., 261-300 (electronic). [MR] [GS?]
  2. Coleman, Robert F. (2005). The canonical subgroup of E is Spec,R[x]/(x^ p+fracpE_p-1(E,ω)x). Asian J. Math. 9 No.2, 257-260. [MR] [GS?]
  3. Coleman, Robert F. (2005). On the components of X_0(p^n). J. Number Theory 110 No.1, 3-21. [MR] [GS?]
  4. Coleman, Robert F. and Stein, William A. (2004). Approximation of eigenforms of infinite slope by eigenforms of finite slope. In Geometric aspects of Dwork theory. Vol. I, II 437-449 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin. [MR] [GS?]
  5. Coleman, Robert F. (2003). Stable maps of curves. Doc. Math. No.Extra Vol., 217-225 (electronic). Kazuya Kato's fiftieth birthday. [MR] [GS?]

Robert F. Coleman

YEAR APPOINTED: 1983

RETIRED: 2013

DECEASED: 2014