Professor Jonathan Rogawski passed away on September 27, 2011, after a long battle with cancer. Rogawski was a key figure in the dynamic and central field of automorphic forms. He was 56 and had been ill for nearly a decade.
Rogawski was raised in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles and attended the Palisades public high school. He began his higher education at Yale University from which he received simultaneous BS and MS degrees in 1976. He did his Ph.D. research at Princeton University and received his mathematics Ph.D. in 1980 from that school. His thesis advisor was Robert P. Langlands, author of the visionary Langlands Program which asserts the existence of remarkable connections between the fields of infinite dimensional representation theory, algebraic geometry, number theory, and automorphic forms. After his Ph.D., Rogawski held positions at the SFB at the University of Bonn (1980 – 1981), Yale University (1981 – 1983), the Institute for Advanced Study (1983 – 1984), and the University of Chicago (1984 – 1986). He came to UCLA as an associate professor in 1986 and advanced to full professor in 1989.
