John Mather (mathematician)

John Mather 2005 in Oberwolfach

John Norman Mather (born June 9, 1942 in Los Angeles , California , † January 28, 2017 in Princeton , New Jersey ) was an American mathematician who dealt with differential topology, especially singularity theory (" catastrophe theory ").

Live and act

Mather studied at Harvard University ( bachelor's degree 1964) and received his doctorate in 1967 with John Willard Milnor at Princeton University (Stability of Mappings I: The Division Theorem, Annals of Mathematics Vol. 87, 1968, p. 89). From 1967 to 1969 he was Professor Associé at IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette near Paris . From 1969 he was associate professor and from 1971 professor at Harvard and from 1974 first visiting professor and from 1975 professor at Princeton. He was visiting professor at IHES (1982/83), ETH Zurich (1989/90) and 2004/05 at Caltech . ${\displaystyle C^{\infty }}$

He is known for his investigations into the topological stability of infinitely often differentiable mappings between two differentiable (smooth) manifolds with dimensions n (base manifold M) and p (target manifold P) and determined the dimensions n, p in which such stable mappings (stable with respect to diffeomorphisms of M, P) exist. He also proved a conjecture by René Thom about the generic stability of such infinitely often differentiable maps. With his work, he contributed a lot to the strict mathematical justification of the so-called "catastrophe theory".

Mather later also dealt with Hamiltonian dynamical systems, e.g. B. the four-body problem of celestial mechanics.

In 1970/72 he was a Sloan Research Fellow and 1989/90 Guggenheim Fellow . He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences , whose John C. Carty Award he received in 1978, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In 2003 he received the Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics from the American Mathematical Society and the SIAM . In 2000 he was awarded the National Order for Scientific Merit of Brazil. In 2004 he became an honorary professor at Nanjing University . From 1990 to 2001 he was co-editor of the Annals of Mathematics.

Mather was invited speaker at the ICM 1974 in Vancouver (Foliations and local homology groups of diffeomorphisms) and in Berkeley 1986 (Dynamics of area preserving mappings). In 2014 he received the Brouwer Medal .

Mather comes from an old American family (one of his ancestors is Cotton Mather from the Salem witch trials).

See also

• Mather-Thurston's theorem

Fonts

• Mather, Notes on topological stability, first Harvard 1971, PDF file

Web links

• CV at Princeton University, PDF file (28 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Department Mourns Professor John N. Mather * 67, 1942-2016. In: Princeton University. Archived from the original on February 2, 2017 ; accessed on February 2, 2017 .