Name Herbert Clemens | ||
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Born 15 August 1939 (age 84) ( 1939-08-15 ) Dayton, Ohio Other names Clemens, Charles Herbert | ||
Occupation American mathematician | ||
Charles Herbert Clemens Jr., known as Herbert Clemens, (born 15 August 1939 in Dayton, Ohio) is an American mathematician, specializing in complex algebraic geometry.
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Biography
Clemens received in 1961 his bachelor's degree from Holy Cross College and in 1966 his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley under Phillip Griffiths with thesis Picard-Lefschetz Theorem for Families of Algebraic Varieties Acquiring Certain Singularities. He became at Columbia University in 1970 an assistant professor and then an associate professor before leaving to become in 1975 an associate professor at the University of Utah, where he became a full professor in 1976.
Clemens was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study from September 1968 to March 1970 and from September 2001 to June 2003. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1976 at Vancouver and in 1986 at Berkeley and gave a talk Curves on higher dimensional complex projective manifolds. For the academic year 1974–1975 he was a Sloan Fellow.
In 1972 Clemens and Griffiths proved that a cubic three-fold is in general not a rational variety, providing an example for three dimensions that unirationality does not imply rationality. In 1986 Clemens was an editor of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics.
He married in 1983 and has three children.