John Mather (mathematician)

John Norman Mather ( born June 9, 1942 in Los Angeles ) is an American mathematician who deals with differential topology, specifically the singularity theory ( " catastrophe theory ").

Life and work

Mather was educated at Harvard ( BA 1964) and was founded in 1967 by John Milnor at Princeton University PhD ( Stability of mappings I: The division theorem, Annals of Mathematics Bd.87, 1968, p.89). 1967 to 1969 he was professor at the Associé IHES in Bures -sur -Yvette, near Paris. From 1969 he was an associate professor and in 1971 professor at Harvard and from 1974 first Visiting Professor and in 1975 Professor at Princeton. He was a visiting professor at IHES (1982 /83), ETH Zurich (1989 /90) and 2004/ 05 at Caltech.

He is known for his research on the topological stability of infinitely often differentiable maps between two differentiable ( smooth ) manifolds with dimensions n (base manifold M ) and p ( target manifold P) and determined the dimensions n, p, where such stable pictures ( stable with respect to diffeomorphisms exist M, P). He also proved a conjecture of René Thom via the generic stability of such infinitely often differentiable maps. He wore his work a lot to rigorous mathematical justification of the so-called " catastrophe theory " at.

Mather dealt later with Hamiltonian dynamical systems, eg the four- body problem of celestial mechanics.

1970/72 he was a Sloan Fellow and 1989/90 Guggenheim Fellow. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the John C. Carty medal he received in 1978, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In 2003 he received the Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics of the American Mathematical Society and SIAM. 2000 he received the National Medal for Scientific Achievements of Brazil. In 2004 he became an Honorary Professor of Nanjing University. 1990 to 2001 he was associate editor of the Annals of Mathematics.

Mather was invited speaker at the ICM 1974 in Vancouver ( Foliations and local homology groups of diffeomorphisms ) and Berkeley, in 1986 ( Dynamics of area preserving mappings ). In 2014 he received the Brouwer Medal.

Mather comes from an old American family ( one of his ancestors is Cotton Mather from the Salem witch trials ).

Writings

Mather, Notes on topological stability, Harvard first in 1971, pdf file