Lawrence C Washington

Biography

Washington studied at Johns Hopkins University, where in 1971 he received his B.A. and master's degree. In 1974 he earned his PhD at Princeton University under Kenkichi Iwasawa with thesis Class numbers and Z p extensions. He then became an assistant professor at Stanford University and from 1977 at the University of Maryland, where he became in 1981 an associate professor and in 1986 a professor. He held visiting positions at several institutions, including IHES (1980/81), Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik (1984), the Institute for Advanced Study (1996), and MSRI (1986/87), as well as at the University of Perugia, Nankai University and the State University of Campinas.

Washington wrote a standard work on cyclotomic fields. He also worked on p-adic L-functions. He wrote a treatise with Allan Adler on their discovery of a connection between higher-dimensional analogues of magic squares and p-adic L-functions. Washington has done important work on Iwasawa theory, Cohen-Lenstra heuristics, and elliptic curves and their applications to cryptography.

In Iwasawa theory he proved with Bruce Ferrero in 1979 a conjecture of Kenkichi Iwasawa, that the μ -invariant vanishes for cyclotomic Z_p-extensions of abelian number fields (Theorem of Ferrero-Washington).

In 1979–1981 he was a Sloan Fellow.

Selected works