Education and Career
Quillen was born in Orange, New Jersey, and attended Newark Academy. He entered Harvard University, where he earned both his BA (1961) and his PhD (1964), the latter of which was completed under the supervision of Raoul Bott with a thesis in partial differential equations. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1959.
Quillen obtained a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after completing his doctorate. However, he also spent a number of years at several other universities. This experience would prove to be important in influencing the direction of his research.
He visited France twice: first as a Sloan Fellow in Paris, during the academic year 1968–69, where he was greatly influenced by Grothendieck, and then, during 1973-74, as a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1969-70, he was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he came under the influence of Michael Atiyah. In 1978, Quillen received a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Helsinki.
Quillen retired at the end of 2006. He died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on April 30, 2011, aged 70, in Florida.
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