Portrait of Lou van den Dries

Birthday profile

Lou van den Dries

Lou van den Dries, Dutch mathematician

Born
May 26, 1951
Age in 2026
75
Zodiac sign
Gemini
Birth year
1951

About Lou van den Dries

Laurentius Petrus Dignus "Lou" van den Dries (born May 26, 1951) is a Dutch mathematician working in model theory. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. == Education == Van den Dries began his undergraduate studies in 1969 at Utrecht University, and in 1978 completed his PhD there under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen with a dissertation entitled Model Theory of Fields. == Career and research == Van den Dries was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1982–1983 academic year. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1986 and became a professor in its Center for Advanced Study in 1998. In 2021, van den Dries retired and became a professor emeritus. Van den Dries is most known for his seminal work in o-minimality, but he has also made contributions to the model theory of p-adic fields, valued fields, and finite fields, and to the study of transseries. With Alex Wilkie, he improved Gromov's theorem on groups of polynomial growth using nonstandard methods. Van den Dries was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1990 and 2018, and delivered the Tarski Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. == Awards and honours == Van den Dries has been a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

Lou van den Dries timeline

  1. Van den Dries was jointly awarded the 2018 Karp Prize with Matthias Aschenbrenner and Joris van der Hoeven "for their work in model theory, especially on asymptotic differential algebra and the model theory of transseries".
  2. In 2021, van den Dries retired and became a professor emeritus.

The world when Lou van den Dries was born

Lou van den Dries was born in 1951. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1951

  • #1 song"Too Young" – Nat King Cole
  • Top movieAn American in Paris
  • Top TV showI Love Lucy
  • Best-selling bookThe Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentBobby Thomson's "Shot Heard Round the World"
  • Top headlineI Love Lucy premieres and becomes a cultural phenomenon
  • Technology milestoneFirst commercial computer (UNIVAC I) delivered
  • Defining fadI Love Lucy
  • Notable inventionSuper Glue
  • World population2.59 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderHarry S. Truman
  • Sports championNew York Yankees (World Series)
  • Also wonRochester Royals (NBA)
  • U.S. population154.0M

1951 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Lou van den Dries's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19512026
Gas$0.27$3.45/gal
Average home$8,800$435,000
Average income$5,500$67,500
Minimum wage$0.75$7.25/hr (federal)
Movie ticket$0.53$11.95
Postage stamp$0.03$0.73
Population154.0M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.