David William Catlin (born 12 May 1952 Rochester, Pennsylvania) is an American mathematician who works on the theory of several complex variables.
Catlin received in 1978 his Ph.D. from Princeton University under Joseph Kohn with thesis Boundary Behavior of Holomorphic Functions on Weakly Pseudoconvex Domains.[1][2] He is a professor at Purdue University.
He solved a boundary behavior problem of complex analysis in several variables, on which his teacher Kohn worked in detail and which was originally formulated by Donald Spencer, a particular case of the Neumann problem for , a non-elliptic boundary value problem.[3][4]
Catlin was an Invited Speaker with talk Regularity of solutions of the -Neumann problem at the ICM in 1986 in Berkeley. In 1989 he received the inaugural Stefan Bergman Prize.
His brother Paul Allen Catlin (1948–1995) also achieved fame as a mathematician, doing research on graph theory.