Rate My Professor Jacob Lurie

Jacob Lurie is the Frank C. and Florence S. Ogg Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 2000 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004, where his thesis was supervised by Michael J. Hopkins. Following his doctorate, Lurie held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. He then served as associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2009 and as professor of mathematics at Harvard University from 2009 to 2019. In 2019, he joined the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Lurie’s research centers on algebraic geometry, topology, and homotopy theory, with foundational contributions to derived algebraic geometry and higher category theory that have influenced a range of fields from topology to number theory. His work has redefined aspects of homotopy theory and the topological foundations of algebraic geometry. He is the author of the books Higher Topos Theory, published in 2009, and Higher Algebra, published in 2011. Lurie received the AMS–MAA–SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize in 2000, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, the London Mathematical Society Hardy Fellowship in 2016, and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020. He has served on the editorial board of Compositio Mathematica from 2011 to 2014 and as associate editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society from 2009 to 2014. His proof of the Baez-Dolan cobordism hypothesis has provided a precise connection between manifold theory and operadic algebra.