Don Zagier elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei

Don Zagier, Director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, was elected as a new member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

Don Zagier, born in 1951 in Heidelberg, is an emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. He obtained his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1971 and during most of his working life has occupied two positions, one in Germany (in particular as a Scientific Member and later Director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn from 1984 to 2019) and one in another country (12 years University of Maryland, 12 years Universiteit Utrecht, 12 years Collège de France, and since 2014 at the ICTP in Trieste). His main research are number theory, combinatorics, and topology, and especially the theory of modular forms and its applications both within number theory (most notably to the solution of the Gauss number problem and towards the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer, both jointly with B. Gross) and to many other domains of mathematics and mathematical physics. He is a full or foreign member of various academies, including the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen and has also been the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Cole Prize of the AMS (1987), the Karl-Georg-Christian-von-Staudt-Preis (2001), the Fudan Zhongzhi Science Award (2021), and the Heinz Gumin Prize (2024).

The Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei was the first private institution to promote the natural sciences in Europe. It was founded in Rome in 1603 and is now Italy's national academy of sciences. The most famous member was Galileo Galilei, who became a member in April 1611. According to the 1986 statutes, the Academy has 180 full Italian members, 180 foreign members and 180 Italian correspondents. They are organised into two classes (Classe di Scienze Fisiche, Matematiche e Naturali and Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche) with different categories (e.g. Matematica, Meccanica e Applicazioni or Archeologia) and sections (as examples Matematica, Meccanica e applicazioni della Matematica or Botanica e applicazioni, only in the natural sciences class).