Sidney Martin Webster

Sidney Martin Webster (born 12 November 1945 in Danville, Illinois) is an American mathematician, specializing in multidimensional complex analysis.[1]

After military service, Webster attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student, receiving a PhD in 1975 under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern[1] with thesis Real hypersurfaces in complex space.[2] Webster was a faculty member at Princeton University from 1975 to 1980 and at the University of Minnesota from 1980 to 1989. In 1989 he became a full professor at the University of Chicago. He has held visiting positions at the University of Wuppertal, Rice University, and ETH Zurich.[1]

Webster was a Sloan Fellow for the academic year 1979–1980. In 1994 in Zurich he was an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians.[3] In 2001 he received, jointly with László Lempert, the Stefan Bergman Prize from the American Mathematical Society.[1] In 2012 Webster was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

In 1977 he proved a significant theorem on biholomorphic mappings between algebraic real hypersurfaces.[4] Using his expertise on Chern-Moser invariants, he developed a theory that provides a complete set of invariants for nondegenerate real hypersurfaces under volume-preserving biholomorphic transformations.[5] He used the edge-of-the-wedge theorem to prove an extension theorem that generalized a 1974 theorem of Charles Fefferman.[6][1]

  1. ^ a b c d e Jackson, Allyn (October 2001). "Lempert and Webster Receive 2001 Bergman Prize" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 49 (9): 998–999.
  2. ^ Sidney Martin Webster at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Webster, Sidney M. (1995). "Geometric and dynamical aspects of real submanifolds of complex spaces". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Zürich, 1994. pp. 917–921. doi:10.1007/978-3-0348-9078-6_84. ISBN 978-3-0348-9897-3.
  4. ^ Webster, S. M. (1977). "On the mapping problem for algebraic real hypersurfaces". Inventiones Math. 43: 53–68. Bibcode:1977InMat..43...53W. doi:10.1007/BF01390203. S2CID 122533957.
  5. ^ Webster, S. M. (1978). "Pseudo-Hermitian structures on a real hypersurface". Journal of Differential Geometry. 13 (1): 25–41. doi:10.4310/jdg/1214434345.
  6. ^ Webster, S. M. (August 1978). "On the reflection principle in several complex variable". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 71 (1): 26–28. doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-1978-0477138-4.