Edward Witten is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a professor emeritus in the school of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau announced retirement from Harvard to become Chair Professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University.
In geometry, the Minkowski sum of two sets of position vectors A and B in Euclidean space is formed by adding each vector in A to each vector in B:
Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London.
The mathematical term perverse sheaves refers to a certain abelian category associated to a topological space X, which may be a real or complex manifold, or a more general topologically stratified space, usually singular. This concept was introduced in the thesis of Zoghman Mebkhout, gaining more popularity after the (independent) work of Joseph Bernstein, Alexander Beilinson, and Pierre Deligne (1982) as a formalisation of the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence, which related the topology of singular spaces and the algebraic theory of differential equations. It was clear from the outset that perverse sheaves are fundamental mathematical objects at the crossroads of algebraic geometry, topology, analysis and differential equations. They also play an important role in number theory, algebra, and representation theory. The properties characterizing perverse sheaves already appeared in the 75's paper of Kashiwara on the constructibility of solutions of holonomic D-modules.
In mathematics, and especially differential topology and gauge theory, Donaldson's theorem states that a definite intersection form of a compact, oriented, smooth manifold of dimension 4 is diagonalisable. If the intersection form is positive (negative) definite, it can be diagonalized to the identity matrix over the integers. The original version of the theorem required the manifold to be simply connected, but it was later improved to apply to 4-manifolds with any fundamental group.
Mathai Varghese is a mathematician at the University of Adelaide. His first most influential contribution is the Mathai–Quillen formalism, which he formulated together with Daniel Quillen, and which has since found applications in index theory and topological quantum field theory. He was appointed a full professor in 2006. He was appointed Director of the Institute for Geometry and its Applications in 2009. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2013, he was appointed the Elder Professor of Mathematics at the University of Adelaide, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia. In 2017, he was awarded an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Hannan Medal and Lecture from the Australian Academy of Science, recognizing an outstanding career in Mathematics. In 2021, he was also awarded the prestigious George Szekeres Medal which is the Australian Mathematical Society’s most prestigious medal, recognising research achievement and an outstanding record of promoting and supporting the discipline.
In mathematics, the Brunn–Minkowski theorem is an inequality relating the volumes of compact subsets of Euclidean space. The original version of the Brunn–Minkowski theorem applied to convex sets; the generalization to compact nonconvex sets stated here is due to Lazar Lyusternik (1935).
In differential geometry, an affine manifold is a differentiable manifold equipped with a flat, torsion-free connection.
In mathematics, geometric measure theory (GMT) is the study of geometric properties of sets through measure theory. It allows mathematicians to extend tools from differential geometry to a much larger class of surfaces that are not necessarily smooth.
Xu-Jia Wang is a Chinese-Australian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
In differential geometry, the Minkowski problem, named after Hermann Minkowski, asks for the construction of a strictly convex compact surface S whose Gaussian curvature is specified. More precisely, the input to the problem is a strictly positive real function ƒ defined on a sphere, and the surface that is to be constructed should have Gaussian curvature ƒ(n(x)) at the point x, where n(x) denotes the normal to S at x. Eugenio Calabi stated: "From the geometric view point it [the Minkowski problem] is the Rosetta Stone, from which several related problems can be solved."
In the mathematical field of convex geometry, the Busemann–Petty problem, introduced by Herbert Busemann and Clinton Myers Petty, asks whether it is true that a symmetric convex body with larger central hyperplane sections has larger volume. More precisely, if K, T are symmetric convex bodies in Rn such that
In convex geometry, the projection body of a convex body in n-dimensional Euclidean space is the convex body such that for any vector , the support function of in the direction u is the (n – 1)-dimensional volume of the projection of K onto the hyperplane orthogonal to u.
Eckhard Meinrenken is a German-Canadian mathematician working in differential geometry and mathematical physics. He is a professor at University of Toronto.
In mathematics, an ancient solution to a differential equation is a solution that can be extrapolated backwards to all past times, without singularities. That is, it is a solution "that is defined on a time interval of the form (−∞, T)."
William James Firey (1923–2004) was an American mathematician, specializing in the geometry of convex bodies.
John "Jack" Marshall Lee is an American mathematician and professor at the University of Washington specializing in differential geometry.
Robert Clark Penner is an American mathematician whose work in geometry and combinatorics has found applications in high-energy physics and more recently in theoretical biology. He is the son of Sol Penner, an aerospace engineer.
In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Gauss curvature flow is a geometric flow for oriented hypersurfaces of Riemannian manifolds. In the case of curves in a two-dimensional manifold, it is identical with the curve shortening flow. The mean curvature flow is a different geometric flow which also has the curve shortening flow as a special case.
