John T. Tate, a mathematician who explained many fundamental ideas in the theory of numbers, many of which now bear his name, and who won the 2010 Abel Prize, a top math award modeled after the Nobels, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 94 .

His death was confirmed by Harvard University, where he taught for many years.

Number theory is, in large part, the study of finding solutions to equations that cast insight into the fundamental properties of integers. But instead of solving equations one by one, theorists like Dr. Tate look for underlying patterns in similar equations and develop tools to tackle them.

“Tate is really the person who laid the big bricks in that theory,” said Kenneth A. Ribet , a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former a graduate student of Dr. Tate’s.

For example, Fermat’s Last Theorem , a seemingly simple statement made by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, is a problem of number theory. Fermat asserted that equations of the form aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ do not have solutions when n is an integer greater than 2 and a, b and c are positive integers.