Nicholas Shepherd-Barron

Shepherd-Barron was a scholar of Winchester College. He obtained his B.A. at Jesus College, Cambridge in 1976, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Miles Reid in 1981.[1][2]

In 2013, he moved from the University of Cambridge to King's College London.[3]

Shepherd-Barron works in various aspects of algebraic geometry, such as: singularities in the minimal model program; compactification of moduli spaces; the rationality of orbit spaces, including the moduli spaces of curves of genus 4 and 6; the geography of algebraic surfaces in positive characteristic, including a proof of Raynaud's conjecture; canonical models[lower-alpha 1] of moduli spaces of abelian varieties; the Schottky problem at the boundary; the relation between algebraic groups and del Pezzo surfaces; the period map for elliptic surfaces.

In 2008, with the number theorists Michael Harris and Richard Taylor, he proved the original version of the Sato–Tate conjecture and its generalization to totally real fields, under mild assumptions.[4]

Shepherd-Barron was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.

He is the son of John Shepherd-Barron, a Scottish inventor, who was responsible for inventing the first cash machine in 1967.[5]