Michael Artin (born 1934) is an American mathematician and a professor at MIT, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. He is the son of Emil Artin. He was brought up in Indiana. In the early 1960s he spent time at the IHES in France, contributing to the SGA4 volumes of the Séminaire de géométrie algébrique, on topos theory and étale cohomology.He also worked on the question of characterising the representable functors in the category of schemes; this led to the Artin approximation theorem, in local algebra. This work also gave rise to the ideas of an algebraic space and algebraic stack, and has proved very influential in moduli theory. Additionally, he has made contributions to the deformation theory of algebraic varieties. In 2002, he won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He is currently working on non-commutative rings, especially geometric aspects.His Erdõs number is 3.