Joe Harris (mathematician)

This article is about Joe Harris, the mathematician. For other persons named Joseph Harris, see Joseph Harris (disambiguation).

Joe Harris
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Born	(1951-08-17) August 17, 1951
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Harvard University
Alma mater	Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Phillip Griffiths
Doctoral students	Dan Abramovich Lucia Caporaso James McKernan Juan Migliore Rahul Pandharipande Ravi Vakil

Joseph Daniel Harris (born August 17, 1951), known nearly universally as Joe Harris, is a mathematician at Harvard University working in the field of algebraic geometry. He attended college at and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978 under Phillip Griffiths.

During the 1980s he was on the faculty of Brown University, moving to Harvard around 1988. He served as chair of the department at Harvard from 2002 to 2005. His work is characterized by its classical geometric flavor: he has claimed that nothing he thinks about could not have been imagined by the Italian geometers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that if he has had greater success than them, it is because he has access to better tools.

Harris is well known for several of his books on algebraic geometry, notable for their informal presentations:

• Principles of Algebraic Geometry ISBN 978-0-471-05059-9, with Phillip Griffiths
• Geometry of Algebraic Curves, Vol. 1 ISBN 978-0-387-90997-4, with Enrico Arbarello, Maurizio Cornalba, and Phillip Griffiths
• , with William Fulton
• , with David Eisenbud
• Moduli of Curves ISBN 978-0-387-98438-4, with Ian Morrison.

Harris has supervised 41 Ph.D. students (as of 2012), including Dan Abramovich, James McKernan, Rahul Pandharipande, Jason Starr and Ravi Vakil.