John Henry Coates FRS[4] (26 January 1945 – 9 May 2022) was an Australian mathematician who was the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom from 1986 to 2012.

[11][7] In England he did postgraduate research at the University of Cambridge, his doctoral dissertation being on p-adic analogues of Baker's method.

Here he supervised the PhD of Andrew Wiles, and together they proved a partial case of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for elliptic curves with complex multiplication.

[18] The latter organisation awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1997,[11] for "his fundamental research in number theory and for his many contributions to mathematical life both in the UK and internationally".

[19] His nomination for the Royal Society reads: Distinguished for his contributions to the theory of numbers, in particular to the study of transcendence, cyclotomic fields and elliptic curves.