David Mumford

David Mumford is currently University Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. He was awarded the Fields medal in 1974 for work in algebraic geometry, was a MacArthur Foundation Fellow from 1987 to 1992, and President of the International Mathematical Union from 1995 to 1998. Before coming to Brown University, he served as the Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Harvard. Here he provides a personal perspective on how his research interests developed:
I was born in Three Bridges, Sussex, England in 1937 but moved to the US in 1940. I went to Harvard as a Freshman in 1953 where I was very interested by Wiener's vision of Cybernetics and the fusion of neurobiology and computers. But both of these fields were very primitive then and I followed my PhD adviser Oscar Zariski into the beautiful abstract field of algebraic geometry. I stayed on at Harvard, working in algebraic geometry, and eventually becoming Higgins Professor of Mathematics. About 1983, I read David Marr's work on vision and turned back to my earlier interests. Since then I have tried to understand how mathematics can clarify the complex processes of thinking and especially of perception. Variational techniques and PDE's turned out to capture some of the problems in vision. But around 1989 I learned of the ideas of Grenander, how Bayesian statistical inference can be used to reason in noisy uncertain environments. I moved to Brown University in 1995 to work with his group. To flesh out this approach, which I now believe is central to modelling thought of every kind, I have worked on many problems in vision and cortical modelling. Although every field in AI is notorious for overstating its progress, I hope to live to see it achieve some computational milestones.



	David Mumford David Mumford is currently University Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. He was awarded the Fields medal in 1974 for work in algebraic geometry, was a MacArthur Foundation Fellow from 1987 to 1992, and President of the International Mathematical Union from 1995 to 1998. Before coming to Brown University, he served as the Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Harvard. Here he provides a personal perspective on how his research interests developed: I was born in Three Bridges, Sussex, England in 1937 but moved to the US in 1940. I went to Harvard as a Freshman in 1953 where I was very interested by Wiener's vision of Cybernetics and the fusion of neurobiology and computers. But both of these fields were very primitive then and I followed my PhD adviser Oscar Zariski into the beautiful abstract field of algebraic geometry. I stayed on at Harvard, working in algebraic geometry, and eventually becoming Higgins Professor of Mathematics. About 1983, I read David Marr's work on vision and turned back to my earlier interests. Since then I have tried to understand how mathematics can clarify the complex processes of thinking and especially of perception. Variational techniques and PDE's turned out to capture some of the problems in vision. But around 1989 I learned of the ideas of Grenander, how Bayesian statistical inference can be used to reason in noisy uncertain environments. I moved to Brown University in 1995 to work with his group. To flesh out this approach, which I now believe is central to modelling thought of every kind, I have worked on many problems in vision and cortical modelling. Although every field in AI is notorious for overstating its progress, I hope to live to see it achieve some computational milestones.
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