William Philip Minicozzi II is an American

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 ...

. He was born in Bryn Mawr,

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

, in 1967.

Career

Minicozzi graduated from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

in 1990 and received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1994 under the direction of

Richard Schoen Richard Melvin Schoen (born October 23, 1950) is an American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He is best known for the resolution of the Yamabe problem in 1984. Career Born in Celina, Ohio, and a 1 ...

. After graduating he spent a year at the

Courant Institute The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU), and is among the most prestigious mathematics schools and mathematical sciences research cente ...

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

as a visiting member where he began working with

Tobias Colding Tobias Holck Colding (born 1963) is a Danish mathematician working on geometric analysis, and low-dimensional topology. He is the great grandchild of Ludwig August Colding. Biography He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to Torben Holck Colding ...

harmonic functions In mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of stochastic processes, a harmonic function is a twice continuously differentiable function f: U \to \mathbb R, where is an open subset of that satisfies Laplace's equation, that is, : \f ...

Riemannian manifold In differential geometry, a Riemannian manifold or Riemannian space , so called after the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is a real manifold, real, smooth manifold ''M'' equipped with a positive-definite Inner product space, inner product ...

s, work he was later invited to present at the Geometry Festival. In 1995, he went to the

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

, with a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. Minicozzi became the J. J. Sylvester Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins in 2002, and later became Krieger-Eisenhower Professor there. He turned to work on

minimal surfaces In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature (see definitions below). The term "minimal surface" is used because these surfaces originally arose as surfaces that ...

, continuing to work with

. In 2012 he joined

MIT 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 m ...

as a professor of mathematics. Currently, they mainly work on the

mean curvature flow In the field of differential geometry in mathematics, mean curvature flow is an example of a geometric flow of hypersurfaces in a Riemannian manifold (for example, smooth surfaces in 3-dimensional Euclidean space). Intuitively, a family of surf ...

. In addition to his teaching and research duties, Minicozzi serves as an editor of the

American Journal of Mathematics The ''American Journal of Mathematics'' is a bimonthly mathematics journal published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. History The ''American Journal of Mathematics'' is the oldest continuously published mathematical journal in the United ...

Awards and honors

He won a

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in 1998. He gave an invited address on this work at the 2006 ICM in Madrid, a London Mathematical Society Spitalfields Lecture in 2007, the thirty-fifth

University of Arkansas The University of Arkansas (U of A, UArk, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It is the flagship campus of the University of Arkansas System and the largest university in the state. Founded as Arkansas ...

Spring Lecture Series in 2010, and an AMS invited address in

Syracuse Syracuse may refer to: Places Italy *Syracuse, Sicily, or spelled as ''Siracusa'' *Province of Syracuse United States *Syracuse, New York **East Syracuse, New York **North Syracuse, New York *Syracuse, Indiana * Syracuse, Kansas *Syracuse, Miss ...

in 2010. In 2010 William P. Minicozzi received the

Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry __NOTOC__ The Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry is an award granted by the American Mathematical Society for notable research in geometry or topology. It was founded in 1961 in memory of Oswald Veblen. The Veblen Prize is now worth US$5000, and is ...

together with

for their work on

minimal surface In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature (see definitions below). The term "minimal surface" is used because these surfaces originally arose as surfaces that ...

s. In justification of the reward the American Mathematical Society wrote: In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-02-04.

Selected publications

* * * * * *

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Minicozzi, William Johns Hopkins University faculty Stanford University alumni 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Differential geometers Living people 1967 births Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Mathematicians from Pennsylvania People from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania