John Lott (mathematician)

John William Lott (born January 12, 1959 in Rolla , Missouri ) is an American mathematician.

John Lott, Oberwolfach 2010

Lott studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (bachelor's degree in 1978) and at the University of California, Berkeley (master's degree in mathematics in 1980, in physics in 1981), where he received his doctorate in 1983 under Isadore Singer ( Applications of Heat Kernel Expansions of Quantum Field Theory ). He then worked as a post-doc at Harvard University until 1985 and at IHES from 1985 to 1987 . In 1987 he became Assistant Professor, 1989 Associate Professor and 1996 Professor at the University of Michigan . He has been a professor at Berkeley since 2009. He has been a visiting scientist at IHES, MSRI (where he was a research professor in 2001 and 2004) and at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics .

Lott deals with differential geometry, initially mainly in mathematical physics in the theory of Yang-Mills fields , supersymmetry and non-commutative geometry. With Cédric Villani he dealt with the application of optimal transport to the Ricci curvature in general metric spaces.

Together with Bruce Kleiner, he was a member of one of the teams that checked Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture and gave the laudatory speech for Perelman at the Fields Medal Ceremony in 2006 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

He was a Sloan Research Fellow from 1989 to 1991 and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in 1991/92. In 2013 he and Bruce Kleiner received the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing .

Fonts (selection)

• with Alain Connes : Particle models and noncommutative geometry. In: Nuclear Physics B. Proceedings Supplements . Vol. 18, No. 2, 1991, pp. 29-47, doi : 10.1016 / 0920-5632 (91) 90120-4 .
• Heat kernels on covering spaces and topological invariants. In: Journal of Differential Geometry. Vol. 35, No. 2, 1992, pp. 471-510, doi : 10.4310 / jdg / 1214448084 .
• Superconnections and higher index theory. In: Geometric and Functional Analysis. Vol. 2, No. 4, 1992, pp. 421-454 .
• with Jean-Michel Bismut : Flat vector bundles, direct images and higher real analytic torsion. In: Journal of the American Mathematical Society . Vol. 8, No. 2, 1995, pp. 291-363, doi : 10.2307 / 2152820 .
• with Wolfgang Lück : -Topological invariants of 3-manifolds. In: Inventiones Mathematicae . Vol. 120, No. 1, 1995, pp. 15-60 . ${\displaystyle L^{2}}$
• with Bruce Kleiner : Notes on Perelman's papers. In: Geometry & Topology . Vol. 12, No. 5, 2008, pp. 2587-2855, doi : 10.2140 / gt.2008.12.2587 .
• with Cédric Villani : Ricci curvature for metric-measure spaces via optimal transport. In: Annals of Mathematics . Series 2, Vol. 169, No. 3, 2009, pp. 903-991, JSTOR 25662148 .
• Optimal transport and Perelman's reduced volume. In: Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations. Vol. 36, No. 1, 2009, pp. 49-84, doi : 10.1007 / s00526-009-0223-8 .

Web links

• John Lott Homepage in Berkeley