Tom Ilmanen

Last updated
Tom Ilmanen
Born1961
NationalityAmerican
EducationPh.D. in Mathematics
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
OccupationMathematician
Known forResearch in differential geometry, proof of Riemannian Penrose conjecture

Tom Ilmanen (born 1961) is an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry and the calculus of variations. He is a professor at ETH Zurich. [1] He obtained his PhD in 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley with Lawrence Craig Evans as supervisor. [2] Ilmanen and Gerhard Huisken used inverse mean curvature flow to prove [3] the Riemannian Penrose conjecture, which is the fifteenth problem in Yau's list of open problems, [4] and was resolved at the same time in greater generality by Hubert Bray using alternative methods. [5]

In their 2001 paper [3] , Huisken and Ilmanen made a conjecture on the mathematics of general relativity, about the curvature in spaces with very little mass: as the mass of the space shrinks to zero, the curvature of the space also shrinks to zero. This was proved in 2023 by Conghan Dong and Antoine Song. [6] [7]

In an influential preprint (Singularities of mean curvature flow of surfaces - 1995), Ilmanen conjectured:

For a smooth one-parameter family of closed embedded surfaces in Euclidean 3-space flowing by mean curvature, every tangent flow at the first singular time has multiplicity one. [8]

This has become known as the "multiplicity-one" conjecture. Richard Bamler and Bruce Kleiner proved the multiplicity-one conjecture in a 2023 preprint. [9] [10]

Ilmanen received a Sloan Fellowship in 1996. [11]

He wrote the research monograph Elliptic Regularization and Partial Regularity for Motion by Mean Curvature. [12]

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ "Prof. Dr. Tom Ilmanen". ETH Zurich - Department of Mathematics. 2020-05-11. Retrieved 2025-03-31.
  2. ↑ Tom Ilmanen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 1 2 Huisken, Gerhard; Ilmanen, Tom (2001-11-01). "The Inverse Mean Curvature Flow and the Riemannian Penrose Inequality" (PDF). Journal of Differential Geometry. 59 (3): 353–437. doi: 10.4310/jdg/1090349447 . ISSN   0022-040X . Retrieved 2025-03-31.
  4. ↑ Differential Geometry: Partial Differential Equations on Manifolds. (1993). In R. Greene & S.-T. Yau (Eds.), Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics. American Mathematical Society. https://doi.org/10.1090/pspum/054.1 https://doi.org/10.1090/pspum/054.1
  5. ↑ Mars, M. (2009). "Present status of the Penrose inequality". Classical and Quantum Gravity (Vol. 26, Issue 19, p. 193). IOP Publishing.
  6. ↑ Nadis, Steve (30 November 2023), "A Century Later, New Math Smooths Out General Relativity", Quanta Magazine
  7. ↑ Dong, Conghan; Song, Antoine (2025). "Stability of Euclidean 3-space for the positive mass theorem". Inventiones mathematicae. 239 (1): 287–319. doi:10.1007/s00222-024-01302-z. ISSN   0020-9910.
  8. ↑ Colding, Tobias; Minicozzi, William (2012-03-01). "Generic mean curvature flow I; generic singularities" (PDF). Annals of Mathematics. 175 (2): 755–833. doi: 10.4007/annals.2012.175.2.7 . ISSN   0003-486X . Retrieved 2025-04-01.
  9. ↑ Nadis, Steve (2025-03-31). "A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 2025-03-31.
  10. ↑ Bamler, Richard; Kleiner, Bruce. "On the Multiplicity-One Conjecture for Mean Curvature Flows of Surfaces" . Retrieved 2025-03-31.
  11. ↑ "Fellows Database | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation". sloan.org.
  12. ↑ Ilmanen, Tom (1994). Elliptic Regularization and Partial Regularity for Motion by Mean Curvature. Providence, R.I: American Mathematical Soc. ISBN   978-0-8218-2582-2.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.