News-Letter

Media Credit: Britni Crocker In his free time, Zucker often frequents the Recreation Center.

Any visitor to the office of mathematics Professor Steven Zucker is immediately drawn in. On the shelves, cartoons mix and mingle with stacks of books, and an old picture of Zucker himself sits tucked neatly behind a newspaper. And of course, the chalkboard nearly is filled with complex math expressions.

Zucker is a carefree professor, known among his students for his outrageous comments and delightfully off-color jokes.

"Everyone knows that I am from Mars," Zucker said, when asked where he was born and raised. However, our sources tell us that it is much more likely that Zucker was born and raised in Queens, NY.

Quickly recognized as a gifted student at Martin Van Buren High School, Zucker was ushered into advanced math and science classes, areas that were of dire importance in the post-Sputnik era.

Zucker found he was interested in mathematics and physics especially, and these subjects quickly rose to the top of the list of what he planned to study in college.

After being admitted to Brown University for his undergraduate studies, Zucker found himself in an Honors Calculus III course his freshman year. This course, although unconventional, was perfect for Zucker, who is an unconventional man himself.

"I ate it all up," Zucker recalled, in reference to the course that was possibly the most influential in Zucker's path to becoming a mathematician.

After completing his undergraduate studies at Brown, Zucker attended graduate studies at Princeton which he completed in 1974. After his studies, Zucker was a visiting professor at Rutgers and Indiana University before he accepted a position in the mathematics department at Hopkins.

Zucker is well-known in the mathematical community for his work with algebraic geometry in the theories of L2 cohomology. One result, proven by Zucker in 1978, was named appropriately the Zucker Conjecture, an idea profound enough to deserve its own Wikipedia entry.

"Math is a universal language, along with English," Zucker joked, when asked what keeps his passion for mathematics research burning.

Already an accomplished mathematician, Zucker began to dabble in the field of teaching, an area that truly sparked his interest after coming to Hopkins.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools