Rate My Professor Florian Breuer

Professor Florian Breuer is a Professor of Mathematics in the School of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Newcastle, where he serves as Director of the Priority Research Centre for Computer-Assisted Research Mathematics and its Applications (CARMA). His specialty area is number theory, with research interests in elliptic curves, Drinfeld modules, Drinfeld modular forms, arithmetic of function fields, Ducci sequences, and post-quantum cryptography. Breuer grew up in Stellenbosch, South Africa, completing his undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics there. He received a French government bursary for graduate studies in Paris, earning a D.E.A. (Masters) from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 1999 and a PhD from Université Denis Diderot in 2002 under supervisor Marc Hindry. Postdoctoral fellowships took him to National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan (2003) and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany (2004). At Stellenbosch University, he progressed from Senior Lecturer (2004) to Associate Professor (2007), Head of Mathematics Division (2012-2015), and Full Professor (2013), earning the Meiring-Naude Medal (2008) and an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship (2009).

In 2018, Breuer joined the University of Newcastle as Professor, retaining an Extraordinary Professor title at Stellenbosch until 2021. He holds editorial positions with the Journal of Number Theory and Quaestiones Mathematicae, and has renewed Humboldt Fellowships in 2019 and 2024. Notable publications include "Drinfeld Modular Forms of Arbitrary Rank" (Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 2024), "Explicit bounds on the coefficients of modular polynomials for the elliptic j-invariant" (Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society Series B, 2024), "Explicit bounds on the coefficients of modular polynomials and the size of X0(N)" (Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2025), "Parity Bias In Fundamental Units Of Real Quadratic Fields" (Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society, 2025), "Drinfeld modular polynomials of level T" (International Journal of Number Theory, 2026), and "Multiplicative orders of Gauss periods and the arithmetic of real quadratic fields" (Finite Fields and Their Applications, 2021). Breuer has supervised multiple PhD students, including "Heights and Drinfeld A-modules" (2023, Newcastle), contributing to the field's advancement through rigorous scholarship and international collaborations.