John N. Mather, American mathematician, Died at 74

  Educator

John Norman Mather was born on June 9, 1942, and died on January 28, 2017.

He was a mathematician at Princeton University.

He was known for his work on singularity theory and Hamiltonian dynamics.

Mather was descended from Atherton Mather (1663-1734), a cousin of Cotton Mather.

John’s early work dealt with the stability of smooth mappings between smooth manifolds of dimensions n (for the source manifold N) and p (for the target manifold P).

Mather’s determined the precise dimensions (n,p) for which smooth mappings are stable with respect to smooth equivalence by diffeomorphisms of the source and target (i.e. infinitely differentiable coordinate changes).

Mather was a member of the National Academy of Sciences beginning in 1988.

John N. Mather passed away at 74 years old.