John H. Coates
John Henry Coates was an Australian mathematician who was the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom from 1986 to 2012.
Early life and education
Coates was born the son of J. H. Coates and B. L. Lee on 26 January 1945 and grew up in Possum Brush in New South Wales, Australia. Coates Road in Possum Brush is named after the family farm on which he grew up. Before university he spent a summer working for BHP in Newcastle, New South Wales, though he was not successful in gaining a university scholarship with the company. Coates attended Australian National University on scholarship as one of the first undergraduates, from which he gained a BSc degree. He then moved to France, doing further study at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, before moving again, this time to England.Career
In England he did postgraduate research at the University of Cambridge, his doctoral dissertation being on p-adic analogues of Baker's method. In 1969, Coates was appointed assistant professor of mathematics at Harvard University in the United States, before moving again in 1972 to Stanford University where he became an associate professor.In 1975, he returned to England, where he was made a fellow of Emmanuel College, and took up a lectureship. Here he supervised the PhD of Andrew Wiles, and together they proved a partial case of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for elliptic curves with complex multiplication.
In 1977, Coates moved back to Australia, becoming a professor at the Australian National University, where he had been an undergraduate. The following year, he moved back to France, taking up a professorship at the University of Paris XI at Orsay. In 1985, he returned to the École Normale Supérieure, this time as professor and director of mathematics.
From 1986 until his death, Coates worked in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) of the University of Cambridge. He was head of DPMMS from 1991 to 1997.
His research interests included Iwasawa theory, number theory and arithmetical algebraic geometry.
He served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009.