Wilfried Schmid

Who is Wilfried Schmid?

Wilfried Schmid is a German-American mathematician who works in Hodge theory, representation theory, and automorphic forms. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in 1967 under the direction of Phillip Griffiths, and then taught at Berkeley and Columbia University, becoming a Full Professor at Columbia at age 27. In 1978 he moved to Harvard University, where he is currently the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics.

Schmid's early work concerns the construction of discrete series representations of semi-simple Lie groups. Notable accomplishments here include a proof of Langlands' conjecture on the discrete series, along with a later proof constructing all such discrete series representations on spaces of harmonic spinors. Schmid along with his student Henryk Hecht proved Blattner's conjecture in 1975. In the 1970s he described the singularities of the Griffith's period map by applying Lie-theoretic methods to problems in algebraic geometry.

Schmid has been very involved in K–12 mathematics education both nationally and internationally. His interest arose in 1999 after being disturbed by the experiences of his 2nd-grade daughter in her mathematics class. He was heavily involved in the drafting of the Massachusetts Mathematics Curriculum Framework in 2000. Later, he served on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel of the U.S. Department of Education.