Professor of Mathematics, University of British Columbia
David Boyd received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1966. At that time he worked in harmonic analysis and in particular interpfolation theory for rearrangement invariant spaces. Subsequently his work shifted into number theory, particularly the theory of Pisot and Salem numbers and Mahler's measure. He is particularly interested in the role of computation in pure mathematics. After his Ph.D., he spent a year at the University of Alberta, then moved to the California Institute of Technology where he spent the next four years, and finally moving to the University of British Columbia where he has been a professor of mathematics since 1974. He was awarded the 1978 E.W.R. Steacie Prize in Science for his work on Pisot sequences and Salem numbers. He was the Canadian Mathematical Society's Coxeter-James lecturer for 1979 and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1980.