Sidney Martin Webster

Sidney Martin Webster (born 12 November 1945 in Danville, Illinois) is an American mathematician, specializing in multidimensional complex analysis.

After military service, Webster attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student, receiving a PhD in 1975 under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern Webster was a faculty member at Princeton University from 1975 to 1980 and at the University of Minnesota from 1980 to 1989. In 1989 he became a full professor at the University of Chicago. He has held visiting positions at the University of Wuppertal, Rice University, and ETH Zurich. In 2001 he received, jointly with László Lempert, the Stefan Bergman Prize from the American Mathematical Society. Using his expertise on Chern-Moser invariants, he developed a theory that provides a complete set of invariants for nondegenerate real hypersurfaces under volume-preserving biholomorphic transformations. He used the edge-of-the-wedge theorem to prove an extension theorem that generalized a 1974 theorem of Charles Fefferman.

Selected publications

with Klas Diederich: with Jürgen K. Moser: