Thomas Friedrich (mathematician)

Thomas Friedrich (born October 12, 1949 in Leipzig ; † February 27, 2018 in Marburg ) was a German mathematician who worked in the field of differential geometry and global analysis .

Live and act

Friedrich attended the 54th elementary school in Leipzig (1956–1964), the Leibniz Oberschule in Schkeuditz (1964–1966) and the ABF in Halle (1966–1968). After graduating from high school in Halle, he studied from 1968 to 1973 at the university in Wrocław, Poland . Under the guidance of the Wrocław mathematicians Roman Duda and Witold Roter, he specialized in the fields of topology and differential geometry.

From 1973 he worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin . Here he received his doctorate in 1973 under Rolf Sulanke with an application of the Morse theory to the integral curvatures of submanifolds of Euclidean spaces . In 1974 he stayed at the Banach Center in Warsaw . 1977/78 and 1984 he was visiting scholar at the Lomonossow University in Moscow . He completed his habilitation at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1979 with a thesis on the Dirac operator Riemannian manifolds and was a lecturer in geometry from 1980. Since 1987, Thomas Friedrich has been a full or C4 professor for global analysis at Humboldt University.

Since 1980 Friedrich worked as head of the research group Differential Geometry and Global Analysis at the Humboldt University . From 1992 to 2003 he was the speaker of the Graduate School 46 Geometry and Nonlinear Analysis at the HU and on the board of the Collaborative Research Center 288 Differential Geometry and Quantum Physics . From 2005 to 2008 Friedrich was one of the project managers in the Collaborative Research Center 647 Space-Time-Matter at the Humboldt University, and from 2008 to 2012 Director of Studies at the Institute for Mathematics there. During this time, u. a. designed and implemented the Bachelor's and Master's degree in mathematics.

In 1980 Friedrich proved an optimal lower bound for the first Dirac eigenvalue of a compact Riemann spin manifold . Furthermore, together with Herbert Kurke , he classified the Kähler Twistor rooms or self-dual Einstein rooms with positive scalar curvature, a result achieved simultaneously and independently by Nigel Hitchin (1981). In the 1980s he and his doctoral students studied Riemannian manifolds with Killing spinors as well as applications of twistor theory on surfaces in 4-dimensional spaces. Friedrich dealt with pin structures of Riemannian manifolds together with Andrzej Trautman in the 1990s. With Stefan Ivanov from Sofia and Ilka Agricola , he has been studying non-integrable geometric structures, their torsions and Dirac operators since 2000 .

Friedrich was visiting scholar at the University of Maryland (1982, 1990), the École polytechnique (1983), the University of Montpellier (1982), the University of Nantes (1989), at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn (1994) , at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Vienna (1994), at the National University of Seoul (2004 and 2006) and at the University of Córdoba (2010).

In 2003 he received the Medal of Honor from Charles University in Prague .

Thomas Friedrich had been editor of the mathematical journal Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry since 1982 . On this topic, Friedrich and Rolf Sulanke organized larger conferences in Mecklenburg in 1981 ( Garwitz ) and 1988 ( Göhren-Lebbin ).

His doctoral students include Ilka Agricola , Helga Baum , Ines Kath (Professor in Greifswald), Eui Chul Kim (Professor in Andong ), Klaus Mohnke (Professor in Berlin), Pablo Ramacher (Professor in Marburg), Uwe Semmelmann (Professor in Stuttgart).

Thomas Friedrich had retired as a professor at the Humboldt University since April 2015 and lived in Marburg with his second wife, Ilka Agricola.

Fonts

m-functions and their application to total absolute curvature , Math. Nachr. 67 (1975), 281-301.
The first eigenvalue of the Dirac operator of a compact, Riemannian manifold of non-negative scalar curvature , Math. Nachr. 97 (1980), 117-146.
with Herbert Kurke : Compact four-dimensional self-dual Einstein manifolds with positive scalar curvature , Math. Nachr. 106 (1982), 271-299.
On surfaces in four-spaces , Ann. Glob. Anal. Geom. 2: 257-287 (1984).
The Fisher information and symplectic structures , Math. Nachr. 153 (1991), 273-296.
with Ines Kath, Andrei Moroianu and Uwe Semmelmann: On nearly parallel G_2-structures , Journ. Geom. Phys. 23: 259-286 (1997).
On the spinor representation of surfaces in Euclidean 3-spaces , Journ. Geom. Phys. 1998, 28: 143-157.
with Eui Chul Kim: The Einstein-Dirac equation on Riemannian Spin-manifolds , Journ. Geom. Phys. 33: 128-172 (2000).
with Andrzej Trautman : Spin spaces, Lipschitz groups and spinor bundles , Ann. Glob. Anal. Geom. 18 (2000), 221-240.
with Stefan Ivanov: Parallel spinors and connections with skew-symmetric torsion in string theory , Asian Journ. Math. 6: 303-336 (2002).
with Ilka Agricola : On the holonomy of connections with skew-symmetric torsion , Math. Ann. 328: 711-748 (2004).

Books

Lectures on K theory , Teubner 1978
with Helga Baum , Ralf Grunewald, Ines Kath: Twistors and Killing Spinors on Riemannian Manifolds , Teubner 1991
Dirac operators in Riemannian geometry , Vieweg 1997 (with appendix to the Seiberg-Witten theory; English edition AMS Publications 2000)
with Ilka Agricola : Global Analysis- Differential Forms in Analysis, Geometry and Physics , Vieweg 2001 (English edition AMS Publications 2002), 2nd edition 2010
with Ilka Agricola : Elementarge Geometry , Vieweg 2005 (English edition AMS Publications 2008), 4th edition 2014
as editor: Self dual Riemannian Geometry and Instantons , Teubner 1981

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Friedrich, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	October 12, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH	Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH	February 27, 2018
Place of death	Marburg