John H Coates

Early life and education Coates was born the son of J. H. Coates and B. L. Lee on 26 January 1945 and grew up in Possum Brush (near Taree) in New South Wales, Australia. Coates Road in Possum Brush is named after the family farm on which he grew up. Before university he spent a summer working for BHP in Newcastle, New South Wales, though he was not successful in gaining a university scholarship with the company. Coates attended Australian National University on scholarship as one of the first undergraduates, from which he gained a BSc degree. He then moved to France, doing further study at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, before moving again, this time to England. and took up a lectureship. Here he supervised the PhD of Andrew Wiles, and together they proved a partial case of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for elliptic curves with complex multiplication.

In 1977, Coates moved back to Australia, becoming a professor at the Australian National University,

His research interests included Iwasawa theory, number theory and arithmetical algebraic geometry.

He served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009.

Awards and honours Coates was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1985, and was President of the London Mathematical Society from 1988 to 1990. The latter organisation awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1997, His nomination for the Royal Society reads:

Distinguished for his contributions to the theory of numbers, in particular to the study of transcendence, cyclotomic fields and elliptic curves. In addition to his own important contributions he has been a stimulating influence on colleagues and students. Together with his pupil A. Wiles he achieved the first major breakthrough towards a proof of the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjectures.