Christopher Skinner

Christopher McLean Skinner (born June 4, 1972) is an American mathematician and professor at Princeton University. He works in algebraic number theory and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands program.

Early life and education
Skinner was born on June 4, 1972 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Skinner graduated with a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1993. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1997 under the supervision of Andrew Wiles.

Career
Skinner was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1997 to 2000. He was then an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan from 2000 to 2004, and then a full professor from 2004 to 2006. He became a professor of mathematics at Princeton University in 2006.

Research
Skinner and Wiles proved modularity results for residually reducible Galois representations in joint work.

Skinner and Eric Urban proved many cases of Iwasawa–Greenberg main conjectures for a large class of modular forms. As a consequence, for a modular elliptic curve over the rational numbers, they prove that the vanishing of the Hasse–Weil L-function L(E, s) of E at s = 1 implies that the p-adic Selmer group of E is infinite. Combined with theorems of Gross–Zagier and Kolyvagin, this gave a conditional proof (on the Tate–Shafarevich conjecture) of the conjecture that E has infinitely many rational points if and only if L(E, 1) = 0, a (weak) form of the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. These results were used by Manjul Bhargava, Skinner, and Wei Zhang to prove that a positive proportion of elliptic curves satisfy the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

Awards and honors
Skinner was a Packard Foundation Fellow from 2001 to 2006 and a Sloan Research Fellow from 2001 to 2002. He was named an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013. In 2015, he was named a Simons Investigator in Mathematics.

He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006.