Michael Weiss (born 14 December 1955) is a German mathematician and an expert in algebraic and geometric topology. He is a professor at the

University of Münster The University of Münster (german: Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, WWU) is a public research university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. With more than 43,000 students and over 120 fields of stud ...

Life

He completed his PhD in 1982 at the

University of Warwick , mottoeng = Mind moves matter , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £7.0 million (2021) , budget = £698.2 million (202 ...

under the supervision of Brian Sanderson. He was then affiliated as a researcher with the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies near Paris and the universities of

Bielefeld Bielefeld () is a city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 341,755, it is also the most populous city in the administrative region ('' Regierungsbezirk'') of Detmold and ...

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

, and

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

. In 1999, he joined the faculty of

Aberdeen University , mottoeng = The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom , established = , type = Public research universityAncient university , endowment = £58.4 million (2021) , budget ...

where he stayed until 2011, when he was awarded a Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at the University of Münster.

Academic Work

His research is on

algebraic topology Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classif ...

and

differential topology In mathematics, differential topology is the field dealing with the topological properties and smooth properties of smooth manifolds. In this sense differential topology is distinct from the closely related field of differential geometry, which ...

. In work with

Ib Madsen Ib Henning Madsen (born 12 April 1942, in Copenhagen)Curriculum vitae
retrieved 3 February 2013. is a Dani ...

, he resolved the Mumford Conjecture about rational

characteristic class In mathematics, a characteristic class is a way of associating to each principal bundle of ''X'' a cohomology class of ''X''. The cohomology class measures the extent the bundle is "twisted" and whether it possesses sections. Characteristic class ...

es of surface bundles in the limit as the genus tends to infinity. Allen Hatcher,
A Short Exposition of the Madsen–Weiss Theorem
' Building on earlier work of Thomas Goodwillie, he developed Embedding Calculus, a Calculus of functors for embeddings of manifolds.

Recognition

In 2006, he was awarded the

Fröhlich Prize The Fröhlich Prize of the London Mathematical Society is awarded in even numbered years in memory of Albrecht Fröhlich. The prize is awarded for original and extremely innovative work in any branch of mathematics. According to the regulations ...

of the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

Publications

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References

External links

Website at the University of Münster
1955 births Living people Topologists 20th-century German mathematicians 21st-century German mathematicians Academic staff of the University of Münster Alumni of the University of Warwick Place of birth missing (living people) {{Germany-mathematician-stub