William Messing

Who is William Messing?

William Messing is an American mathematician who works in the field of arithmetic algebraic geometry.

Messing received his doctorate in 1971 at Princeton University under the supervisions of Alexander Grothendieck with his thesis entitled The Crystals Associated to Barsotti–Tate Groups: With Applications to Abelian Schemes. In 1972, he was a C.L.E. Moore instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor at the University of Minnesota.

In his thesis, Messing elaborated on Grothendieck's 1970 lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice on p-divisible groups that are important in algebraic geometry in prime characteristic, which were introduced in the 1950s by Dieudonné in his study of Lie algebras over fields of finite characteristic. Messing worked together with Pierre Berthelot, Barry Mazur and Aise Johan de Jong.