Robert Osserman

Robert Osserman ( born December 19, 1926 in New York City; † November 30, 2011 in Berkeley ) was an American mathematician who worked on geometric function theory, differential geometry and minimal surfaces.

Life

Osserman, born in 1926 in New York City, attended the Bronx High School of Science, studied at New York University and ( after interim military service) at Harvard University (as well as in Paris and Zurich ), where he received his doctorate in 1955 Lars Ahlfors, with a thesis on the type of problem Riemannian surfaces ( Contributions to the problem of type ). After that, he was at Stanford University, where he remained for the rest of his career and retired. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard, at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Paris, 1976 Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Warwick and head of the mathematics department at the Office of Naval Research. 1973 to 1979 he was Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Stanford. In 1987 he was there Mellon Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. Since 1990 he was a ( part-time) Deputy Director at MSRI, where he served as Special Projects Director for various public works also since 1995.

Osserman dealt primarily with minimal surfaces from the viewpoint of conformal geometry, but also with isoperimetric inequalities and ergodic theory. In 1970 he showed that the plateau problem solutions without singularities ( independently showed this also Robert Gulliver 1973).

In 1985, he gave a simple proof of the four -vertex theorem that every simple closed curve in the plane except the circle at least four extrema ( maxima / minima ) has (the first proof was given by Adolf Kneser 1912).

At Stanford, he also developed new interdisciplinary mathematics courses, some elaborated in his popular science book geometry of the universe ( mathematical applications in cosmology ). He received the Distinguished Teacher Award from Stanford University.

He received the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America ( MAA) and the 2003 Communications Award of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics ( JPBM ) for his popular science writings. In 1978 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki ( isoperimetric inequalities and eigenvalues ​​of the Laplacian ).

His doctoral include H. Blaine Lawson and David Hoffman.

Writings

  • Geometry of the universe. Vieweg 1997 English Original: Poetry of the Universe -a mathematical exploration of the cosmos. Anchor Books / Doubleday, New York, 1996 ( translated into many languages)
  • A survey of minimal surfaces. 2nd edition, Dover 1986
  • Curvature in the Eighties. American Mathematical Monthly, Bd.97, 1990, S.731
  • Osserman: Mathematics of the Heavens. Notices AMS 2005, pdf - file
  • Osserman: From Black to Pick to Ahlfors and Beyond. Notices AMS 1999, pdf - file
  • Osserman: The isoperimetric inequality. BAMS, 1978
  • The four or more vertex theorem. American Mathematical Monthly, Bd.93, 1985, p.332
Berkeley, California Plateau's problem Name Authority File
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