Background
Coates was born the son of J. H. Coates and B. L. Lee and grew up in Possum Brush (near Taree) in New South Wales, Australia. Coates Road in Possum Brush is named after the family farm on which he grew up.
mathematician university professor
Coates was born the son of J. H. Coates and B. L. Lee and grew up in Possum Brush (near Taree) in New South Wales, Australia. Coates Road in Possum Brush is named after the family farm on which he grew up.
Coates attended Australian National University on scholarship as one of the first undergraduates, from which he gained a Bachelor of Science degree.
Before university he spent a summer working for BHP Billiton in Newcastle, New South Wales, though he was not successful in gaining a university scholarship with the company. He then moved to France, doing further study at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, before moving again to England. In England he did postgraduate research at the University of Cambridge, his doctoral dissertation being on p-adic analogues of Baker"s method.
In 1969, Coates was appointed assistant professor of mathematics at Harvard University in the United States, before moving again in 1972 to Stanford University where he became an associate professor
In 1975, he returned to England where he was made a fellow of Emmanuel College, and took up a lectureship. Here he supervised the Doctor of Philosophy of Andrew Wiles, and together they proved a partial case of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for elliptic curves with complex multiplication.
In 1977, Coates moved back to Australia, becoming a professor at the Australian National University, where he had been an undergraduate. The following year, he moved back to France, taking up a professorship at the University of Paris XI at Orsay.
In 1985, he returned to the École Normale Supérieure, this time as professor and director of mathematics.
Since 1986 Coates has worked in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) of the University of Cambridge. In the last ten years he has focused on the study of various aspects of non-commutative Iwasawa theory: for instance, on the study of the arithmetic of elliptic curves in nonabelian infinite extensions.
Coates was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1985, and was President of the London Mathematical Society from 1988 to 1990. The latter organisation awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1997, for "his fundamental research in number theory and for his many contributions to mathematical life both in the United Kingdom and internationally". His nomination for the Royal Society reads:.
Royal Society.
