Zucker, Steven

Steven Mark Zucker (12 September 1949 – 13 September 2019) was an American mathematician who introduced the Zucker conjecture, proved in different ways by Eduard Looijenga (1988) and by Leslie Saper and Mark Stern (1990). Zucker completed his Ph.D. in 1974 at Princeton University under the supervision of Spencer Bloch. His work with David A. Cox led to the creation of the Cox–Zucker machine, an algorithm for determining if a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell–Weil group of an elliptic surface E → S {\displaystyle E\to S} , where S {\displaystyle S} is isomorphic to the projective line. He was part of the mathematics faculty at the Johns Hopkins University. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.