Education
Trinity College.
mathematician university professor
Trinity College.
He was an undergraduate and graduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge. His research supervisor was Alan Baker. In 1979 he moved to the University of Oxford, where since 1999 he has held a professorship in pure mathematics.
Heath-Brown is known for many striking results.
These include an approximate solution to Artin"s conjecture on primitive roots, to the effect that out of 3, 5, 7 (or any three similar multiplicatively-independent square-free integers), one at least is a primitive root modulo p, for infinitely many prime numbers p. He also proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form x3 + 2y3.
In collaboration with South. J. Patterson in 1978 he proved the Kummer conjecture on cubic Gauss sums in its equidistribution form. He has applied Burgess"s method on character sums to the ranks of elliptic curves in families.
He proved that every non-singular cubic form over the rational numbers in at least ten variables represents 0.
Heath-Brown also showed that Linnik"s constant is less than or equal to 5.5. More recently, Heath-Brown is known for his pioneering work on the so-called determinant method. Using this method he was able to prove a conjecture of Serre in the four variable case in 2002.
This particular conjecture of Serre was later dubbed the ''dimension growth conjecture" and this was almost completely solved by various works of Browning, Heath-Brown, and Salberger by 2009.
Royal Society; American Mathematical Society. Göttingen Academy of Sciences]
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1993, and a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in 1999.