Gerd Faltings

Gerd Faltings ( born July 28, 1954 in Gelsenkirchen- Buer ) is a German mathematician and the only winner of the Fields Medal.

Biography

Faltings grew up in a scientifically oriented parents. His father was a physicist and his mother a chemist. Even as a student he fell on mathematical excellence and won twice in the national competition mathematics.

After studying mathematics and physics at the Westfälische Wilhelms- University in Münster (1972-1978), graduate and PhD with Hans -Joachim Nastold Dr. rer. nat. (1978 ) with his work over Macaulayfizierung he went with a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for a year at Harvard University and completed his habilitation (1981 ) in Münster.

In 1982 he moved to the University of Wuppertal and was at the age of 27 years at the time of Germany's youngest full professor of mathematics.

1983 Faltings excited with a 17 -page essay on so-called algebraic curves stir in the mathematical art. In this work, entitled finite sets for abelian varieties over number fields, he proves that on certain algebraic curves only a finite number of points may lie with rational coordinates, a presumption of the British mathematician Louis Mordell - the so-called Mordellsche guess - from 1922, so that was 60 years unsolved. He proves in this work at the same time the Shafarevich conjecture and uses the Arakelov geometry. 1986 was awarded to him for this breakthrough in algebraic geometry, the Fields Medal - next to the Abel Prize, the highest honor in mathematics and a Nobel Prize in other disciplines comparable.

1985 Faltings went for a long time in the U.S. and researched and taught at Princeton University, but kept a visiting professor in Wuppertal. This sparked the public from a debate on the attractiveness of research in Germany for young scientists.

1994 Faltings returned back to Germany and became a scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, where he took possession of a Directorate items from 1995. His main areas of work are Diophantine equations, moduli spaces and p- adic Galois representations.

Also to solve the so-called Fermat's theorem by the British mathematician Andrew Wiles Faltings has contributed Significant.

In addition to literature Faltings has also issued an understandable for non-mathematicians collection of essays as an introduction to modern mathematics.

In 1992 Faltings was elected a member of the Leopoldina. Faltings in 1999 was elected to the North Rhine- Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Honors

259857
de