Thomas Hans Willwacher (born 12 April 1983) is a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and

mathematical physicist Mathematical physics is the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of ...

working as a Professor at the Institute of Mathematics,

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

Biography

Willwacher completed his PhD at

in 2009 with a thesis on "Cyclic Formality", under the supervision of Giovanni Felder, Alberto Cattaneo, and Anton Alekseev. He was a Junior member of the

Harvard Society of Fellows The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intellect ...

from 2010 to 2013. He joined the

University of Zurich The University of Zurich (UZH, ) is a public university, public research university in Zurich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of the ...

as an assistant professor in 2013, and was promoted to associate professor in 2015.

Research and recognition

In July 2016 Willwacher was awarded a prize from the

European Mathematical Society The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The curren ...

for "his striking and important research in a variety of mathematical fields: homotopical algebra, geometry, topology and mathematical physics, including deep results related to Kontsevich's formality theorem and the relation between Kontsevich's graph complex and the Grothendieck-Teichmüller Lie algebra". Notable results of Willwacher include the proof of

Maxim Kontsevich Maxim Lvovich Kontsevich (, ; born 25 August 1964) is a Russian and French mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. He ...

's cyclic formality conjecture and the proof that the Grothendieck–Teichmüller

Lie algebra In mathematics, a Lie algebra (pronounced ) is a vector space \mathfrak g together with an operation called the Lie bracket, an alternating bilinear map \mathfrak g \times \mathfrak g \rightarrow \mathfrak g, that satisfies the Jacobi ident ...

is isomorphic to the degree zero cohomology of Kontsevich's graph complex.

References

External links

* Harvard University alumni Academic staff of ETH Zurich 21st-century German mathematicians ETH Zurich alumni 1983 births Living people German topologists German mathematical physicists {{Germany-mathematician-stub