14 Facts About Gerhard Huisken

Gerhard Huisken was born on 20 May 1958 and is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and partial differential equations.

Gerhard Huisken is known for foundational contributions to the theory of the mean curvature flow, including Huisken's monotonicity formula, which is named after him.

From 1983 to 1984, Gerhard Huisken was a researcher at the Centre for Mathematical Analysis at the Australian National University in Canberra.

From 1992 to 2002, Gerhard Huisken was a full professor at the University of Tubingen, serving as dean of the faculty of mathematics from 1996 to 1998.

In 2002, Gerhard Huisken became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam and, at the same time, an honorary professor at the Free University of Berlin.

Gerhard Huisken remains an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.

Gerhard Huisken's discovery of Huisken's monotonicity formula, valid for general mean curvature flows, is a particularly important tool.

Gerhard Huisken was one of the first authors to consider Richard Hamilton's work on the Ricci flow in higher dimensions.

In 1985, Gerhard Huisken published a version of Hamilton's analysis in arbitrary dimensions, in which Hamilton's assumption of the positivity of Ricci curvature is replaced by a quantitative closeness to constant curvature.

Gerhard Huisken is widely known for his foundational work on the mean curvature flow of hypersurfaces.

Later, Gerhard Huisken extended the calculations in his proof to consider hypersurfaces in general Riemannian manifolds.

Gerhard Huisken's result says that if the hypersurface is sufficiently convex relative to the geometry of the Riemannian manifold, then the mean curvature flow will contract it to a point, and that a normalization of surface area in geodesic normal coordinates will give a smooth deformation to a sphere in Euclidean space.

In 1987, Gerhard Huisken adapted his methods to consider an alternative "mean curvature"-driven flow for closed hypersurfaces in Euclidean space, in which the volume enclosed by the surface is kept constant; the result is directly analogous.

Gerhard Huisken is a fellow of the Heidelberg Academy for Sciences and Humanities, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the American Mathematical Society.