Woodrow Dale Brownawell (born April 21, 1942) is an American mathematician who has performed research in number theory and algebraic geometry. He is a Distinguished Professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University,^[1] and is particularly known for his proof of explicit degree bounds that can be used to turn Hilbert's Nullstellensatz into an effective algorithm.^[2][3]

Brownawell was born in Grundy County, Missouri;^[1] his father was a farmer and train inspector.^[2] He earned a double baccalaureate in German and mathematics (with highest distinction) in 1964 from the University of Kansas,^[1] and after studying for a year at the University of Hamburg^[1] (at which he met Eva, the woman he later married)^[2] he returned to the US for graduate study at Cornell University.^[1] His graduate advisor, Stephen Schanuel, moved to Stony Brook University in 1969, and Brownawell followed him there for a year,^[1] but earned his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1970.^[1][4] That year, he joined the Penn State faculty, and he remained there until his retirement in 2013.^[1]

Brownawell and Michel Waldschmidt shared the 1986 Hardy–Ramanujan Prize for their independent proofs that at least one of the two numbers ${\displaystyle e^{e}}$ and ${\displaystyle e^{e^{2}}}$ is a transcendental number; here ${\displaystyle e}$ denotes Euler's number, approximately 2.718.^[5] In 2004, a conference at the University of Waterloo was held in honor of Brownawell's 60th birthday.^[6] In 2012, he became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.^[7]