Joseph Daniel Harris
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Joseph Daniel Harris (born 1951), known nearly universally as Joe Harris, is a mathematician at Harvard University working in the field of algebraic geometry. He attended college at and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978 under Phillip Griffiths.
During the 1980s he held a position in the mathematics department of Brown University, moving to Harvard around 1988 [check this?], and was the chair of the department at Harvard for the three years ending the summer of 2005. His work is characterized by a classically geometric flavor: he has said that nothing he thinks about could not have been imagined by the Italian geometers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that if he has had greater success than they, it is because he has access to better tools.
Harris is well-known for several of his books on algebraic geometry:
- Principles of Algebraic Geometry ISBN 0-471-05059-8, with Phillip Griffiths
- Geometry of Algebraic Curves, Vol. 1 ISBN 0-387-90997-4, with Enrico Arbarello, Maurizio Cornalba, and Phillip Griffiths
- Algebraic Geometry: A First Course ISBN 0-387-97716-3
- The Geometry of Schemes ISBN 0-387-98637-5, with David Eisenbud
As a writer his style is often informal, at least from the perspective of modern rigorous mathematics, preferring to highlight the geometric nature of his topic rather than dwelling on the often considerable technical details which underlie algebraic geometry. This is not always the case: for example, the first two books above. He presents material in an intuitive manner as a pedagogical aid and reserves the modern formalism for making the intuition precise, if necessary.
Harris is an active advisor, having overseen 32 Ph.D. students as of 2006.
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