rofessor Phillip A Griffiths is Director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. He also holds other important academic and professional positions. He is the editor of the Annals of Mathematics and general secretary of the International Mathematics Union. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University and taught at Harvard University before becoming the Provost of Duke University. In 1993 he accepted the directorship at IAS.

Professor Griffiths is well known for his work in algebraic geometry. He revolutionized the field with analytical and differential geometric methods. Algebraic geometry is a field to study geometric objects, e.g. the zero set of polynomials of elliptic integrals and Riemann surfaces in the second half of the 19th century. Before Professor Griffiths’ work, the algebraic method dominated the field, partly due to the success of algebraic topology. Professor Griffiths continued the tradition of Professors S S Chern, A Weil, K Kodaira and D Spencer in using differential forms, connections and cohomology in the study of algebraic geometry. His pioneering work on the variation of Hodge structure is now very important in the study of mirror symmetry.

His book Principles of Algebraic Geometry, co-authored with Professor J Harris, is a masterpiece in analytic aspects of algebraic geometry. (For algebraic aspects of algebraic geometry one may refer to Grothendieck’s Elements of Algebraic Geometry.) The methods used by Professor Griffiths have been found to be very natural in current studies of geometry, topology and topological quantum field theory. Lately he has been working on the geometry of PDEs via exterior differential systems.