Matthias Kreck

Matthias Kreck ( born July 22, 1947 in Dillenburg ) is a German mathematician who is engaged in algebraic topology and differential topology. He was from October 2006 to September 2011 Director of the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics at the University of Bonn since he is a professor at the city's Department of Mathematics.

Life and work

Kreck grew up as the son of the theologian Walter Kreck on in Herborn and studied from 1966 to 1970 mathematics and physics as well as business administration at the universities of Bonn, Berlin and Regensburg. In 1970, he put in Bonn from his diploma in mathematics and in 1972 he received his doctorate in with Friedrich Hirzebruch ( An invariant for stable parallelized manifolds ). 1972 to 1976 he studied Protestant theology in Bonn, while he was simultaneously 1970-1976 Wizard of Hirzebruch. In 1977 he qualified as a professor in Bonn in Mathematics ( Bordismengruppen of diffeomorphisms ). In 1976 he became a professor at the University of Wuppertal and 1978 at the University of Mainz. 1994 to 2002 he was director of the Mathematical Research Institute in Oberwolfach. He became a professor at the University of Heidelberg from 2007 to 2011, he was director of the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics at the University of Bonn, which he built in 1999. It was 1981/82 and 1989 to 1992 Visiting Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn and scholars among others in Paris, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, Aarhus, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Beijing.

Kreck worked on the classification of manifolds in differential topology (eg with Bordismengruppen ), 4 -manifolds with exotic ( differentiability ) structures and the interaction of differential geometry and topology. In his habilitation in 1977, he managed to complete classification of closed orientable manifolds with smooth diffeomorphisms in the Bordismentheorie, a problem which has already Rene Thom, William Browder and Dennis Sullivan had worked. He developed his own surgery theory, which is applicable under weaker assumptions than traditional surgery theories and which he applied to questions of differential geometry. In the 2000s, it deals with examples of asymmetric topological manifolds.

1990 to 1998 he was associate editor of the Mathematische Annalen and 1998-2002 the archive of Mathematics. Since 2000 he is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In 2003 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Siegen. 2010, the Georg Cantor Medal he was awarded, in 2012 he held the Gaussian lecture.

His doctoral counts Peter Teichner, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and Stephan pride.

As part of the " plagiarism affair ", he initiated the end of February 2011, a "Declaration of high school teachers and university teachers to the standards of academic tests " and the associated signature campaign. First signatories were, inter alia, Martin Carrier, Eckhard Freise, Gerhard Huisken and Werner Nahm.

In his spare time he plays cello.

Publications

• Differential algebraic topology -from stratifolds to exotic spheres, American Mathematical Society 2010
• Bordism of diffeomorphisms and related topics, Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol 1069. 1984 (Annex Neal Stoltzfus )
• Exotic structures on 4 -manifolds, annual report, DMV, Bd.88, 1986, p.124 -145
• Publisher with Wolfgang Lück: The Novikov Conjecture - geometry and algebra, Birkhäuser 2005 ( Oberwolfach Seminar)
• Positive curvature and topology, North Rhine-Westphalia Academy of Sciences, Opladen, West German Verlag 1994
• Kreck, Hambleton: On the classification of topological 4- manifolds with finite fundamental group Mathematische Annalen, Bd.280, 1988, p.85
• Kreck, Lück, Teichner: counterexamples of the Kneser conjecture in dimension 4 Comm.Math.Helveticae Bd.70, 1995, S.423
• Kreck: Surgery and duality. Ann. of Math ( 2) 149 (1999 ), no 3, 707-754.

Other Publications

• My Mietnomade and me. Ingelheim: towpath, 2012.