Burkhard Wilking

Burkhard Wilking

Burkhard Wilking (born November 30, 1970 in Vechta ) is a German mathematician who works in the field of differential geometry .

Life

Wilking graduated from high school Antonianum Vechta (GAV) in 1990 and studied mathematics and physics at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster from 1991 to 1998 , where he obtained his diploma in 1996 and, in 1998, summa cum laude on Group Actions on Manifolds of Nonnegative Curvature and Generalized Bieberbach theorem doctorate . From 1999 to 2002 he worked at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia before he returned to Munster and took over the professorship for mathematics, especially differential geometry, as the successor to his doctoral supervisor Wolfgang T. Meyer .

Wilking is an internationally recognized expert on Riemannian geometry . He made breakthroughs on the classification of Riemannian manifolds of positive curvature and on the question of the convergence of the Ricci River . With Christoph Böhm he proved a conjecture by Richard S. Hamilton that compact Riemannian manifolds with positive curvature operators are space-forms (that is, they have constant curvature).

In 2006 he received the research award from the University of Münster and was invited to the International Congress of Mathematicians . In 2009 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the DFG . The DFG communication states: Wilking [combines] algebraic methods with geometric intuition in a very original way, which enables him to gain a deep understanding of the geometric properties of manifolds.

After Christopher Deninger , Peter Schneider (both 1992), Joachim Cuntz (1999) and Wolfgang Lück (2008), Wilking is the fifth Leibniz Prize winner in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Münster.

In 2016 he was elected a member ( matriculation number 7683 ) of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , in 2018 he was elected to the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts .

Fonts (selection)

• Index parity of closed geodesics and rigidity of Hopf fibrations. Invent. Math. 144 (2001), no. 2, 281-295.
• Manifolds with positive sectional curvature almost everywhere. Invent. Math. 148 (2002), no. 1, 117-141.
• Torus actions on manifolds of positive sectional curvature. Acta Math. 191 (2003), no. 2, 259-297.
• Positively curved manifolds with symmetry. Ann. of Math. (2) 163 (2006), no. 2, 607-668.
• with C. Böhm: Manifolds with positive curvature operators are space forms. Ann. of Math. (2) 167 (2008), no. 3, 1079-1097.

literature

• Leopoldina Newly Elected Members 2016, Leopoldina, Halle (Saale) 2017, p. 50 ( PDF )

Web links

• Homepage at the University of Münster
• Communication from the University of Münster about the award of the Leibniz Prize
• Wilking at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member entry of Burkhard Wilking at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on September 2, 2016.