Education
He attended college at and received his Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard in 1978 under Phillip Griffiths.
He attended college at and received his Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard in 1978 under Phillip Griffiths.
During the 1980s he was on the faculty of Brown University, moving to Harvard around 1988. He served as chair of the department at Harvard from 2002 to 2005. His work is characterized by its classical geometric flavor: he has claimed that nothing he thinks about could not have been imagined by the Italian geometers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that if he has had greater success than them, it is because he has access to better tools.
Harris is well known for several of his books on algebraic geometry, notable for their informal presentations:
Principles of Algebraic Geometry, with Phillip Griffiths
Geometry of Algebraic Curves, Volume
1, with Enrico Arbarello, Maurizio Cornalba, and Phillip Griffiths
William Fulton, Joe Harris. (1991), Representation Theory, A First Course, Graduate Texts in Mathematics 129, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag,, Magnetic Resonance 1153249, with William Fulton
Joe Harris.
(1995), Algebraic Geometry: A First Course, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag,
David Eisenbud, Joe Harris. (2000), The Geometry of Schemes, Graduate Texts in Mathematics 197, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag,, Magnetic Resonance 1730819, with David Eisenbud
Moduli of Curves, with Ian Morrison.
Harris has supervised 41 Doctor of Philosophy students (as of 2012), including James McKernan, Rahul Pandharipande, Zvezdelina Stankova and Ravi Vakil.