Rate My Professor Daniel Goldston

Daniel Alan Goldston is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at San José State University, where he served from 1983 to 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981, with a dissertation titled "Large differences between consecutive prime numbers," advised by Russell Sherman Lehman. Following his doctorate, he held a position at the University of Minnesota Duluth and spent the 1982–1983 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Goldston's research centers on analytic number theory, with contributions to the distribution of prime numbers, gaps between primes, divisor sums, and the Riemann zeta-function. He received continuous National Science Foundation support starting in 1987 and was named San José State University's Presidential Scholar in 2006. Selected publications include "Small gaps between consecutive primes" (conference presentation, 2003), "Higher correlations of divisor sums related to Primes III" (2002), "On the pair correlation of zeros of the Riemann Zeta-Function" (2000), "Primes in short segments of arithmetic progressions" (1998), "Turan's pure power sum problem" (1996), and, with János Pintz and Cem Y. Yıldırım, "Primes in tuples. I" (Annals of Mathematics, 2009), which proved that lim inf (p_{n+1} - p_n) / log p_n = 0. For this work, he shared the 2014 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory from the American Mathematical Society. Goldston was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2021. His conference presentations cover topics such as exponential sums over primes and mean value theorems for Dirichlet polynomials.