David Masser


David William Masser is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Basel. Along with Joseph Oesterlé, Masser formulated the abc conjecture which has been called "the most important unsolved problem in Diophantine analysis".

Career

He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Cambridge in 1974 on the topic of Elliptic Functions and Transcendence.
Before his appointment at the Mathematics Institute in Basel, Masser taught at the University of Michigan. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Warsaw in 1983. He is known for his work in number theory, and was elected to the Royal Society in 2005.