Doris Helga Fischer-Colbrie (born in 1949) [1] [2] is a ceramic artist and former mathematician. [3] She received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1978 from University of California at Berkeley, where her advisor was H. Blaine Lawson. [4]
Many of her contributions to the theory of minimal surfaces are now considered foundational to the field. In particular, her collaboration with Richard Schoen is a landmark contribution to the interaction of stable minimal surfaces with nonnegative scalar curvature. [5] A particular result, also obtained by Manfredo do Carmo and Chiakuei Peng, is that the only complete stable minimal surfaces in ℝ3 are planes. [6] Her work on unstable minimal surfaces gave the basic tools by which to relate the assumption of finite index to conditions on stable subdomains and total curvature. [7] [8]
After positions at Columbia University and San Diego State University, Fischer-Colbrie left academia to become a ceramic artist. She is married to Schoen, with whom she has two children. [9]
Riemannian geometry is the branch of differential geometry that studies Riemannian manifolds, defined as smooth manifolds with a Riemannian metric. This gives, in particular, local notions of angle, length of curves, surface area and volume. From those, some other global quantities can be derived by integrating local contributions.
In the mathematical field of Riemannian geometry, the scalar curvature is a measure of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. To each point on a Riemannian manifold, it assigns a single real number determined by the geometry of the metric near that point. It is defined by a complicated explicit formula in terms of partial derivatives of the metric components, although it is also characterized by the volume of infinitesimally small geodesic balls. In the context of the differential geometry of surfaces, the scalar curvature is twice the Gaussian curvature, and completely characterizes the curvature of a surface. In higher dimensions, however, the scalar curvature only represents one particular part of the Riemann curvature tensor.
In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow, sometimes also referred to as Hamilton's Ricci flow, is a certain partial differential equation for a Riemannian metric. It is often said to be analogous to the diffusion of heat and the heat equation, due to formal similarities in the mathematical structure of the equation. However, it is nonlinear and exhibits many phenomena not present in the study of the heat equation.
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.
Richard Streit Hamilton was an American mathematician who served as the Davies Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University.
Mikhael Leonidovich Gromov is a Russian-French mathematician known for his work in geometry, analysis and group theory. He is a permanent member of Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France and a professor of mathematics at New York University.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, there are various splitting theorems on when a pseudo-Riemannian manifold can be given as a metric product. The best-known is the Cheeger–Gromoll splitting theorem for Riemannian manifolds, although there has also been research into splitting of Lorentzian manifolds.
The Bôcher Memorial Prize was founded by the American Mathematical Society in 1923 in memory of Maxime Bôcher with an initial endowment of $1,450. It is awarded every three years for a notable research work in analysis that has appeared during the past six years. The work must be published in a recognized, peer-reviewed venue. The current award is $5,000.
Richard Melvin Schoen is an American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He is best known for the resolution of the Yamabe problem in 1984 and his works on harmonic maps.
The Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry is an award granted by the American Mathematical Society for notable research in geometry or topology. It was funded in 1961 in memory of Oswald Veblen and first issued in 1964. The Veblen Prize is now worth US$5000, and is awarded every three years.
Hidehiko Yamabe was a Japanese mathematician. Above all, he is famous for discovering that every conformal class on a smooth compact manifold is represented by a Riemannian metric of constant scalar curvature. Other notable contributions include his definitive solution of Hilbert's fifth problem.
In differential geometry, the Yamabe flow is an intrinsic geometric flow—a process which deforms the metric of a Riemannian manifold. First introduced by Richard S. Hamilton, Yamabe flow is for noncompact manifolds, and is the negative L2-gradient flow of the (normalized) total scalar curvature, restricted to a given conformal class: it can be interpreted as deforming a Riemannian metric to a conformal metric of constant scalar curvature, when this flow converges.
Leon Melvyn Simon, born in 1945, is a Leroy P. Steele Prize and Bôcher Prize-winning mathematician, known for deep contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, geometric measure theory, and partial differential equations. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University.
Shoshichi Kobayashi was a Japanese mathematician. He was the eldest brother of electrical engineer and computer scientist Hisashi Kobayashi. His research interests were in Riemannian and complex manifolds, transformation groups of geometric structures, and Lie algebras.
Gerhard Huisken is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and partial differential equations. He is known for foundational contributions to the theory of the mean curvature flow, including Huisken's monotonicity formula, which is named after him. With Tom Ilmanen, he proved a version of the Riemannian Penrose inequality, which is a special case of the more general Penrose conjecture in general relativity.
Michael T. Anderson is an American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research concerns differential geometry including Ricci curvature and minimal surfaces.
Manfredo Perdigão do Carmo was a Brazilian mathematician. He spent most of his career at IMPA and is seen as the doyen of differential geometry in Brazil.
William Hamilton Meeks, III is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry and minimal surfaces.
Xiuxiong Chen is a Chinese-American mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and differential equations. A professor at Stony Brook University since 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 and awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 2019. In 2019, he was awarded the Simons Investigator award.
David Allen Hoffman is an American mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. In 1985, together with William Meeks, he proved that Costa's surface was embedded. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2018, for "contributions to differential geometry, particularly minimal surface theory, and for pioneering the use of computer graphics as an aid to research." He was awarded the Chauvenet Prize in 1990 for his expository article "The Computer-Aided Discovery of New Embedded Minimal Surfaces". He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1971 under the supervision of Robert Osserman.