Princeton, N.J, July 23, 2008 - Helmut Hofer
has been appointed to the Faculty of the School of Mathematics at the
Institute for Advanced Study, effective July 1,
2009. Dr. Hofer comes to the Institute from the
Courant Institute of
Mathematical Sciences of New York University, where he serves
as Silver Professor of Mathematics.
One of the founders of the area of symplectic topology, Dr.
Hofer's research focuses on symplectic geometry, dynamical systems
and partial differential equations. He was a Member in the School
of Mathematics at the Institute in 1987, 2001-02, and
2005.
"Helmut Hofer has taken a leading role in the development of
symplectic geometry, one of the most exciting areas of mathematics
today," commented Peter
Goddard, Director of the Institute. "His
combination of geometric insight and deep analytical skills,
together with his energy and enthusiasm, has provided inspiration
for many other mathematicians. We are delighted that he will be
joining the Faculty of our School of Mathematics."
Peter
Sarnak, Professor in the School of Mathematics stated, "The
fields of symplectic geometry, symplectic topology and related
Hamiltonian dynamics have enjoyed dramatic advances in the last 20
years. Helmut Hofer is one of the main architects of these
developments. Together with his engaging style, energy, record of
collaborations and mentorship, his addition to the Faculty of the
School of Mathematics will position the Institute as a center for
these areas."
Regarding his appointment, Dr. Hofer said, "The Institute is a
unique place and I am thrilled to join its Faculty. During my
professional life, I spent two years at different stages of my
career at IAS. The opportunity to meet and interact with
extraordinary people had a significant impact on my professional
development. I consider it as an extraordinary privilege to be part
of the Institute and to further its mission to encourage and
support fundamental research. "
Dr. Hofer has worked in a number of fields including variational
problems in Hamiltonian dynamics and symplectic and contact
geometry/topology. His work with Ivar Ekeland in the late 1980s
introduced new invariants of symplectic domains called symplectic
capacities, which were used to establish a number of the
foundational results in symplectic topology. The
Arnold Conjecture, perhaps the most striking result in symplectic
topology to date, relates the number of fixed points of a
Hamiltonian symplectomorphism to the topology of the underlying
manifold. Hofer, together with Dietmar Salamon, made a major
contribution towards the solution of this
conjecture. Their work, like all others, built on
the work of Andreas Floer and in particular, Floer
homology. Hofer worked with Floer on several
papers on the subject, some of which were published jointly after
Floer's premature death in 1991.
Following his work on the Arnold Conjecture, Hofer introduced
the method of holomorphic curves in contact
geometry. This led to a wealth of new results in
Hamiltonian dynamics and in particular to a proof of the Weinstein
Conjecture, which is concerned with the existence of periodic
orbits of contact type Hamiltonian systems, in many cases.
This work led him, together with Yakov
Eliashberg, to the concept of contact homology.
In recent works, Hofer and his collaborators Kris Wysocki and
Eduard Zehnder have introduced new analytic tools to study the
geometry of moduli spaces, which provides the foundations for his
ongoing work with Eliashberg on symplectic field theory.
Dr. Hofer studied at the University of Zurich, where he earned an
undergraduate degree in 1979 and a Ph.D. in 1981.
He taught at Zurich from 1979 to 1982, and the following year he
joined the University of Bath
as a Lecturer in Pure Mathematics. From there, he
went to Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey, where he served as Assistant
Professor (1985-87), Associate Professor (1987-88), and then as
Professor (1988-89). Dr. Hofer then went to
Germany and became a C-4 Professor at Ruhr-Universität
Bochum, a position he held from 1989 to 1993. From 1993 to
1997, he was Professor at Eidgenössische Technische
Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. He joined the Courant Institute of
Mathematical Sciences of New York University as Professor in 1997
and was named Silver Professor in 2006.
Dr. Hofer is the recipient of the 1999 Ostrowski
Prize. He was elected to the National Academy of
Sciences and Academia Europaea in 2008. He serves
as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in
the Sciences at Leipzig, Germany, and as co-chair of the
Scientific Advisory Committee of the Mathematics Science Research Institute
(MSRI) in Berkeley. Dr. Hofer also serves on the editorial boards
of Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics and
EMS Monographs in Mathematics, is Associate Editor of
Monographs in Mathematics and was recently named Managing
Editor of Inventiones Mathematicae.
About the Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world's leading
centers for theoretical research and intellectual
inquiry. The Institute exists to encourage and
support fundamental research in the sciences and humanities - the
original, often speculative, thinking that produces advances in
knowledge that change the way we understand the
world. Work at the Institute takes place in four
Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural
Sciences and Social Science. It provides for the
mentoring of scholars by a permanent Faculty of twenty-seven, and
it offers all who work there the freedom to undertake research that
will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of
fields in the sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.
The Institute, founded in 1930, is a private, independent
academic institution located in Princeton, New
Jersey. Its more than 5,000 former Members hold
positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the
academic world. Some twenty-two Nobel Laureates
and thirty-four out of forty-eight Fields Medalists have been
Institute Faculty, Members or Visitors. Many
winners of the Wolf or MacArthur prizes have also been affiliated
with the Institute.
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