Eckhard Meinrenken is a German-Canadian

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

working in

differential geometry Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multili ...

and

mathematical physics Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematics, mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and t ...

. He is a professor at

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

Education and career

Meinrenken studied Physics at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, where he obtained a

Diplom A ''Diplom'' (, from grc, δίπλωμα ''diploma'') is an academic degree in the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and a similarly named degree in some other European countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus ...

in 1990 and a PhD in 1994, with a thesis entitled ''Vielfachheitsformeln für die Quantisierung von Phasenräumen'' (Multiplicity formulas for the quantization of phase spaces), under the supervision of . He was a postdoc at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

from 1995 to 1997, and then he joined

University of Toronto Department of Mathematics The University of Toronto Department of Mathematics is an academic department within the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. It is located at the university's main campus at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology. The ...

in 1998 as assistant professor. In 2000 he become Associated Professor and since 2004 he is Full Professor at the same university. Meinrenken was awarded in 2001 an André Aisenstadt Prize, in 2003 a McLean Award and in 2007 a

NSERC The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering rese ...

Steacie Memorial Fellowship. In 2002 he was invited speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in Beijing and in 2008 he was elected

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Canada judges to have "made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life ...

Research

Meinrenken's research interests lie in the fields of

and

. In particular, he works on

symplectic geometry Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed differential form, closed, nondegenerate form, nondegenerate different ...

Lie theory In mathematics, the mathematician Sophus Lie ( ) initiated lines of study involving integration of differential equations, transformation groups, and contact of spheres that have come to be called Lie theory. For instance, the latter subject is L ...

and

Poisson geometry In differential geometry, a Poisson structure on a smooth manifold M is a Lie bracket \ (called a Poisson bracket in this special case) on the algebra (M) of smooth functions on M , subject to the Leibniz rule : \ = \h + g \ . Equivalen ...

. Among his most important contributions, in 1998 he proved, together with Reyer Sjamaar the conjecture "quantisation commutes with reduction", originally formulated in 1982 by Guillemin and Sternberg. In the same year, together with Anton Alekseev and Anton Malkin, he introduced Lie group-valued

moment map In mathematics, specifically in symplectic geometry, the momentum map (or, by false etymology, moment map) is a tool associated with a Hamiltonian action of a Lie group on a symplectic manifold, used to construct conserved quantities for the ac ...

s in symplectic geometry. Meinrenken is author of more than 50 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, as well as a monograph on

Clifford algebra In mathematics, a Clifford algebra is an algebra generated by a vector space with a quadratic form, and is a unital associative algebra. As -algebras, they generalize the real numbers, complex numbers, quaternions and several other hyperc ...

s. He has supervised 9 PhD students as of 2021.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Meinrenken, Eckhard Living people German mathematicians Canadian mathematicians Academic staff of the University of Toronto Year of birth missing (living people) University of Freiburg alumni Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada