Jürg Peter Buser, known as Peter Buser, (born 27 February 1946 in

Basel , french: link=no, Bâlois(e), it, Basilese , neighboring_municipalities= Allschwil (BL), Hégenheim (FR-68), Binningen (BL), Birsfelden (BL), Bottmingen (BL), Huningue (FR-68), Münchenstein (BL), Muttenz (BL), Reinach (BL), Riehen (BS) ...

) is a Swiss mathematician, specializing in differential geometry and global analysis.

Education and career

Buser received his doctorate in 1976 from the

University of Basel The University of Basel (Latin: ''Universitas Basiliensis'', German: ''Universität Basel'') is a university in Basel, Switzerland. Founded on 4 April 1460, it is Switzerland's oldest university and among the world's oldest surviving universitie ...

with advisor Heinz Huber and thesis ''Untersuchungen über den ersten Eigenwert des Laplaceoperators auf kompakten Flächen'' (Studies on the first eigenvalue of the Laplace operator on compact surfaces). As a post-doctoral student he was at the

University of Bonn The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine ...

, the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

. and the

State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

, before he habilitated at the University of Bonn with a thesis on the length spectrum of Riemann surfaces. Buser is known for his construction of curved isospectral surfaces (published in 1986 and 1988). His 1988 construction led to a negative solution to

Mark Kac Mark Kac ( ; Polish: ''Marek Kac''; August 3, 1914 – October 26, 1984) was a Polish American mathematician. His main interest was probability theory. His question, " Can one hear the shape of a drum?" set off research into spectral theory, the ...

's famous 1966 problem '' Can one hear the shape of a drum?''. The negative solution was published in 1992 by

Scott Wolpert Scott A. Wolpert is an American mathematician specializing in geometry. He is a professor at the University of Maryland. Wolpert received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1976. In 1986 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congre ...

, David Webb and Carolyn S. Gordon. The is named after him and Jeff Cheeger. He has been a professor at the

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine The Seine ( , ) is a river in northern Franc ...

(EPFL) since 1982. From 2004 to 2005 he was president of the

Swiss Mathematical Society The Swiss Mathematical Society (german: Schweizerische Mathematische Gesellschaft; french: Société Mathématique Suisse), founded in Basel on September 4, 1910, is the national mathematical society of Switzerland and a member society of the Euro ...

. In 2003 he was made an honorary doctor of the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Åbo'') in 1640 as the ...

Selected publications

* * * with Hermann Karcher: * with Hermann Karcher: ''Gromov`s almost flat manifolds'', Astérisque 1981, Nr. 81, p. 148
"A note on the isoperimetric constant."
In ''Annales scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure'', vol. 15, no. 2, 1982, pp. 213-230.
"On the bipartition of graphs."
Discrete Applied Mathematics 9, no. 1 (1984): 105–109.
''Isospectral Riemann Surfaces''
Annales Institut Fourier (Grenoble), vol. 36, 1986, pp. 167–192 * ''Cayley graphs and planar isospectral domains'', in

Toshikazu Sunada is a Japanese mathematician and author of many books and essays on mathematics and mathematical sciences. He is professor emeritus of both Meiji University and Tohoku University. He is also distinguished professor of emeritus at Meiji in recogni ...

(ed.), ''Geometry and Analysis on Manifolds'', Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 1339, 1988, pp. 64–77 * ''Geometry and Spectra of Compact Riemann Surfaces'', Birkhäuser 1992;2010 pbk reprint
* with

John Horton Conway John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branc ...

, Peter Doyle, and Klaus-Dieter Semmler: * with

Peter Sarnak Peter Clive Sarnak (born 18 December 1953) is a South African-born mathematician with dual South-African and American nationalities. Sarnak has been a member of the permanent faculty of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced St ...

: * with Mika Seppälä:

References

External links

Homepage at EPFL
{{DEFAULTSORT:Buser, Jurg Peter Swiss mathematicians Differential geometers University of Basel alumni University of Bonn alumni Academic staff of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne 1946 births Living people