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Gerd Faltings

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Gerd Faltings
Faltings in 2005
Born (1954-07-28) 28 July 1954 (age 70)
Gelsenkirchen-Buer, West Germany
NationalityGerman
Alma materUniversity of Münster
Known for
AwardsFields Medal (1986)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1988)
Leibniz Prize (1996)
King Faisal International Prize (2014)
Shaw Prize (2015)
Cantor Medal (2017)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsMax Planck Institute for Mathematics
University of Bonn
Princeton University
University of Wuppertal
Doctoral advisorHans-Joachim Nastold
Doctoral students
Websitewww.hcm.uni-bonn.de/people/profile/gerd-faltings/

Gerd Faltings (German pronunciation: [ɡɛʁt ˈfaltɪŋs] ⓘ; born 28 July 1954) is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry.[3][4]

Education

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From 1972 to 1978, Faltings studied mathematics and physics at the University of Münster. In 1978 he received his PhD in mathematics.[4]

Career and research

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In 1981 he obtained the venia legendi (Habilitation) in mathematics, from the University of Münster. During this time he was an assistant professor at the University of Münster. From 1982 to 1984, he was professor at the University of Wuppertal.[5]

From 1985 to 1994, he was professor at Princeton University. In the fall of 1988 and in the academic year 1992–1993 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.[6]

In 1986 he was awarded the Fields Medal at the ICM at Berkeley for proving the Tate conjecture for abelian varieties over number fields, the Shafarevich conjecture for abelian varieties over number fields and the Mordell conjecture, which states that any non-singular projective curve of genus g > 1 defined over a number field K contains only finitely many K-rational points. As a Fields Medalist he gave an ICM plenary talk Recent progress in arithmetic algebraic geometry.

In 1994 as an ICM invited speaker in Zurich he gave a talk Mumford-Stabilität in der algebraischen Geometrie. Extending methods of Paul Vojta, he proved the Mordell–Lang conjecture, which is a generalization of the Mordell conjecture. Together with Gisbert Wüstholz, he reproved Roth's theorem, for which Roth had been awarded the Fields medal in 1958.

In 1994, he returned to Germany and from 1994 to 2018, he was a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 1996, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.

Faltings has been the formal supervisor of over a dozen students, including Shinichi Mochizuki,[1] Wieslawa Niziol,[2] and Nikolai Dourov.

Awards and honours

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References

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  1. ^ a b Castelvecchi, Davide (7 October 2015). "The biggest mystery in mathematics: Shinichi Mochizuki and the impenetrable proof". Nature. 526 (7572): 178–181. Bibcode:2015Natur.526..178C. doi:10.1038/526178a. PMID 26450038.
  2. ^ a b Gerd Faltings at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Gerd Faltings", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
  4. ^ a b Gerd Faltings at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ^ Kirbach, Roland (8 June 1984). "Gerd Faltings: Genie ist für ihn normal" [Gerd Faltings: For him, genius is the norm]. Die Zeit (in German). Retrieved 14 May 2013.
  6. ^ "Gerd Faltings". Institute for Advanced Study. 9 December 2019.
  7. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Gerd Faltings".
  8. ^ "The Shaw Prize - Top prizes for astronomy, life science and mathematics". www.shawprize.org. Archived from the original on 2019-10-21. Retrieved 2015-06-01.
  9. ^ "Gerd Faltings | Royal Society". royalsociety.org.
  10. ^ "Presseinformationen". www.mathematik.de.
  11. ^ "Gerd Faltings". National Academy of Sciences. 2021-06-10. Retrieved 2022-09-09.
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