Henry Christian Wente

Henry Christian Wente (born August 18, 1936 in New York City , † January 20, 2020 in Toledo , Ohio ) was an American mathematician .

Wente studied at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1958 and a master's degree in 1959 and received his doctorate from Harvard University under Garrett Birkhoff in 1966 ( Existence Theorems for Surfaces of Constant Mean Curvature and Perturbations of a Liquid Globule in Equilibrium ). In 1963 he became an instructor and then an assistant professor at Tufts University and in 1971 an assistant professor and later professor at the University of Toledo .

He dealt with minimal surfaces and surfaces of constant mean curvature (and related to this also with the mathematics of soap bubbles and liquid drops). In 1984 he discovered a torus named after him ( immergiert in ), which was a counterexample to a conjecture by Heinz Hopf (that every closed, compact surface of constant mean curvature is a sphere). There are also counterexamples for other positive genders (the torus has gender g = 1). ${\displaystyle R^{3}}$

In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He was invited speaker at the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley (Immersed tori of constant mean curvature in ). ${\displaystyle R^{3}}$

He died on January 20, 2020 at Mercy Health St. Anne Hospital in Toledo, Ohio.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ↑ Henry Christian Wente in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ^ Wente, Counterexample to a conjecture of H. Hopf, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, Volume 121, 1986, pp. 193-243
4. ↑ Henry C. Wente (1936-2020). In: Blade. Retrieved January 25, 2020 .