Andreas Floer at age 19

Andreas Floer (August 23, 1956 - May 15, 1991) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to the areas of geometry, topology, and mathematical physics. He invented Floer homology, which has proven to be an important tool. In 1988 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and was promoted to Full Professor of Mathematics in 1990. As from Fall 1990 he was a Full Professor of Mathematics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, until his unanticipated suicide. A mathematician is a person whose area of study and research is mathematics. ... Geometry (from the Greek words Geo = earth and metro = measure) is the branch of mathematics first popularized in ancient Greek culture by Thales (circa 624-547 BC) dealing with spatial relationships. ... Topology (Greek topos, place and logos, study) is a branch of mathematics concerned with the study of topological spaces. ... Mathematical physics is a scientific discipline aimed at studying and solving problems inspired by physics within a mathematically rigorous framework. ... University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, University of California, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a public coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California, USA to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate. ...

Education

Floer undertook his Ph.D. dissertation on monopoles on 3-manifolds under the supervision of Clifford Taubes but he did not complete it due to his obligatory alternative service in Germany. He received his Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) at Bochum in 1984 under E. Zehnder. In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a 3-dimensional manifold. ...

Career

Because of his work on Arnold's conjecture and his development of instanton homology, he achieved wide recognition and was invited as a plenary speaker for the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Kyoto in August 1990. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the biggest congress in mathematics. ... This page is about the city Kyoto. ...

Selected publications

• Floer, Andreas. An instanton-invariant for $3$-manifolds. Comm. Math. Phys. 118 (1988), no. 2, 215--240.
• Floer, Andreas. Morse theory for Lagrangian intersections. J. Differential Geom. 28 (1988), no. 3, 513--547.
• Floer, Andreas. Cuplength estimates on Lagrangian intersections. Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 42 (1989), no. 4, 335--356.

External links

• MacTutor bio at University of St. Andrews