Helmut Hofer
Helmut Hofer ( born February 26, 1956) is a German - American mathematician.
Life and work
Hofer visited the Spruce High School in Krefeld ( High School 1974). He studied mathematics at the University of Zurich (Diploma 1979), where he received his doctorate in 1981 at Peter Hess (A Variational Approach to a Class of Resonance Problems with Application to a Wave Equation problem). 1979 to 1982 he was an assistant in Zurich and from 1983 to 1985 Lecturer at the University of Bath. In 1985 he became assistant professor, associate professor in 1987 and professor in 1988 at Rutgers University. From 1989 he was Professor at the Ruhr- University Bochum (the dean he was in 1992 /93) and from 1993 to 1997 professor at the ETH Zurich. From 1997 he was a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, from 2006 as Professor Silver. In 2009 he took up an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was in 1987, 2001/ 02 and 2005 member. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris- Dauphine, at the MSRI (1988 ) in Berkeley, at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, The Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University and at the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris ( 1994). In addition to the German citizenship he also has the U.S. citizenship.
Hofer is a leading scientist in the field of symplectic geometry ( for example, the geometry of Hamiltonian dynamical systems describes ) and one of the founders of the symplectic topology. In the late 1980s he had with Ivar Ekeland there new invariants ( symplectic capacities ) a. He also worked closely with Andreas Floer in the 1980s together. He succeeded in attaining major progress to evidence of variants of the Arnold conjecture in symplectic geometry and the Weinstein conjecture.
From 1987 to 1989 he was a Sloan Fellow. In 1999 he was awarded the Ostrowski Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the Heinz Hopf Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea and since 2010 a member of the Leopoldina since 2008. In 1990 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Kyoto ( Symplectic invariants ) and he held on the ICM in Berlin in 1998 a plenary lecture ( Dynamics, Topology and holomorphic Curves ) He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Writings
- With Eduard Zehnder: Symplectic invariants and Hamiltonian dynamics, Birkhäuser, 1994, ISBN 3-7643-5066-0
- With Clifford Taubes, Alan Weinstein, Eduard Zehnder (Editor): The Floer memorial volume, Birkhauser, 1995