Don Zagier, born in 1951 in Heidelberg, is an American-German mathematician. He obtained his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1971 and during most of his working life has occupied two positions, one in Germany (in particular as a Scientific Member and later Director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn from 1984 to 2019) and one in another country (12 years University of Maryland, 12 years Universiteit Utrecht, 12 years Collège de France, and since 2014 at the ICTP in Trieste). His main research are number theory, combinatorics, and topology, and especially the theory of modular forms and its applications both within number theory (most notably to the solution of the Gauss number problem and towards the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer, both jointly with B. Gross) and to many other domains of mathematics and mathematical physics. He is a full or foreign member of various academies, including the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen and has also been the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Cole Prize of the AMS (1987), the Karl-Georg-Christian-von-Staudt-Preis (2001), the Fudan Zhongzhi Science Award (2021), and the Heinz Gumin Prize (2024).
