Tom Ilmanen

Tom Ilmanen
Born1961
NationalityAmerican
EducationPh.D. in Mathematics
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
OccupationMathematician
Known forResearch in differential geometry, proof of Riemannian Penrose conjecture

Tom Ilmanen (born 1961) is an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry and the calculus of variations. He is a professor at ETH Zurich.[1] He obtained his PhD in 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley with Lawrence Craig Evans as supervisor.[2] Ilmanen and Gerhard Huisken used inverse mean curvature flow to prove the Riemannian Penrose conjecture, which is the fifteenth problem in Yau's list of open problems,[3] and was resolved at the same time in greater generality by Hubert Bray using alternative methods.[4]

In 2001, Huisken and Ilmanen made a conjecture on the mathematics of general relativity, about the curvature in spaces with very little mass. This[clarification needed] was proved in 2023 by Conghan Dong and Antoine Song.[5]

He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1996.[6]

He wrote the research monograph Elliptic Regularization and Partial Regularity for Motion by Mean Curvature.

  1. ^ Switzerland, ETH Zürich Professur für Mathematik HG G. 62 3 Rämistrasse 101 8092 Zürich. "Tom Ilmanen". math.ethz.ch.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ Tom Ilmanen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Differential Geometry: Partial Differential Equations on Manifolds. (1993). In R. Greene & S.-T. Yau (Eds.), Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics. American Mathematical Society. https://doi.org/10.1090/pspum/054.1 https://doi.org/10.1090/pspum/054.1
  4. ^ Mars, M. (2009). "Present status of the Penrose inequality". Classical and Quantum Gravity (Vol. 26, Issue 19, p. 193). IOP Publishing.
  5. ^ Nadis, Steve (30 November 2023), "A Century Later, New Math Smooths Out General Relativity", Quanta Magazine
  6. ^ "Fellows Database | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation". sloan.org.