Alan Baker (mathematician)

Alan Baker, FRS (born 19 August 1939) is an English mathematician, known for his work on effective methods in number theory, in particular those arising from transcendental number theory.

Alan Baker was born in London on 19 August 1939. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970, at age 31. His academic career started as a student of Harold Davenport, at University College London and later at Cambridge. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1970. He is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

His interests are in number theory, transcendence, logarithmic forms, effective methods, Diophantine geometry and Diophantine analysis.

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Baker generalized the Gelfond–Schneider theorem, itself a solution to Hilbert's seventh problem. Specifically, Baker showed that if ${\displaystyle \alpha _{1},...,\alpha _{n}}$ are algebraic numbers (besides 0 or 1), and if ${\displaystyle \beta _{1},..,\beta _{n}}$ are irrational algebraic numbers such that the set ${\displaystyle \{1,\beta _{1},...,\beta _{n}\}}$ are linearly independent over the rational numbers, then the number ${\displaystyle \alpha _{1}^{\beta _{1}}\alpha _{2}^{\beta _{2}}\cdots \alpha _{n}^{\beta _{n}}}$ is transcendental.

• Baker, Alan (1966), "Linear forms in the logarithms of algebraic numbers. I", Mathematika, 13: 204–216, doi:10.1112/S0025579300003971, ISSN 0025-5793, MR 0220680 
• Baker, Alan (1967a), "Linear forms in the logarithms of algebraic numbers. II", Mathematika, 14: 102–107, doi:10.1112/S0025579300008068, ISSN 0025-5793, MR 0220680 
• Baker, Alan (1967b), "Linear forms in the logarithms of algebraic numbers. III", Mathematika, 14: 220–228, doi:10.1112/S0025579300003843, ISSN 0025-5793, MR 0220680 
• Baker, Alan (1990), Transcendental number theory, Cambridge Mathematical Library (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-39791-9, MR 0422171 ; 1st edition. 1975. 
• Baker, Alan; Wüstholz, G. (2007), Logarithmic forms and Diophantine geometry, New Mathematical Monographs, 9, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-88268-2, MR 2382891 

• Stolarsky, Kenneth B. (1978). "Review: Transcendental number theory by Alan Baker; Lectures on transcendental numbers by Kurt Mahler; Nombres transcendants by Michel Waldschmidt" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 84 (8): 1370–1378. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1978-14584-4.