Michael J. Hopkins

Michael Jerome Hopkins ( born April 18, 1958 in Alexandria ( Virginia)) is an American mathematician, with algebraic topology, in particular the homotopy theory, employs.

Hopkins, who wanted to become a rock musician in his own words initially studied mathematics at Northwestern University, where in 1979 he earned his bachelor 's degree. After that he went to Oxford University, where he received his doctorate in 1984 with Ioan James as Dr. Phil. Another time, he received his doctorate in the same year at Northwestern University with Mark Mahowald as Ph.D.. Afterwards, he was from 1984 to 1987, as a post- graduate student and later an assistant professor at Princeton University, 1988/89 as a professor at the University of Chicago 1989 Associate Professor and in 1990 Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since 2005 he is a professor at Harvard University.

Hopkins was Sloan Fellow. In 1994 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Zurich with a lecture on " Topological modular forms, the Witten genus and the theorem of the cube" and kept on the ICM 2002 in Beijing a plenary lecture on " Algebraic Topology and Modular Forms ". In 2000 he gave the Marston Morse Memorial Lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In 2009 he succeeded with Michael A. Hill and Douglas Ravenel an almost complete solution of the Kervaire - Invariantenproblems (after Michel Kervaire ). With Haynes Miller, he led topological modular forms a part of a geometric interpretation of elliptic cohomology.

In 2001 he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize - for his work on nilpotent and periodicity in stable homotopy theory of ( proof of much of the Ravenel conjectures with Ethan Devinatz, Jeffrey H. Smith), for his work on "rigid analytic geometry " and its application in homotopy theory and for his work on elliptic spectra (some with Matthew Ando, ​​Neil Strickland ). In 2012 he was awarded the NAS Award in Mathematics.