Nicholas Michael Katz (/kæts/; born December 7, 1943) is an American mathematician, working in arithmetic geometry, particularly on p-adic methods, monodromy and moduli problems, and number theory.

[1] Katz graduated from Johns Hopkins University (BA 1964) and from Princeton University, where in 1965 he received his master's degree and in 1966 he received his doctorate under supervision of Bernard Dwork with thesis On the Differential Equations Satisfied by Period Matrices.

In 1970 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice (The regularity theorem in algebraic geometry) and in 1978 in Helsinki (p-adic L functions, Serre-Tate local moduli and ratios of solutions of differential equations).

In 2003 he was awarded with Peter Sarnak the Levi L. Conant Prize of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for the essay "Zeroes of Zeta Functions and Symmetry" in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

Katz studied, with Sarnak among others, the connection of the eigenvalue distribution of large random matrices of classical groups to the distribution of the distances of the zeros of various L and zeta functions in algebraic geometry.