Dr. Philip Barron

Philip Barron completed his PhD in Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he researched epipelagic supercuspidal representations of relative rank-one reductive groups over non-archimedean local fields. This lies in the fields of number theory and p-adic representation theory, and is closely associated with the Langlands program.

Dr. Barron brings new knowledge to the Mathematics Department at Bar-Ilan. His postdoctoral research, in the field of representation theory of automorphic forms, lies in the areas of number theory and representation theory.

Until certain breakthroughs occurred in recent decades, epipelagic supercuspidal representations were considered very difficult to construct and study. Since then, several have remained a mystery, including the so-called wildly ramified cases, and these are Dr. Barron’s main interest.

Dr. Barron is part of a broad group of experts in Israel who are focused on specific areas of mathematics, and who are contributing to a mix of American and Israeli culture in the field.

During his six years at UC Santa Cruz, Dr. Barron taught a wide range of math courses and  received very positive feedback. He reflects that being a somewhat timid undergraduate helped him create a nurturing environment where students were free to share their thoughts and ask questions, without fear of giving the wrong answer or asking ‘bad’ questions. He hopes to give more students the confidence to feel that they belong in the mathematical fold.