Gerhard Huisken

Gerhard Huisken was born in Hamburg, Germany, on 20 May 1958. He completed his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Heidelberg in 1983 and spend the first part of his career at the Center for Mathematical Analysis at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 1992 he became a Professor of Mathematics at Tübingen University where he developed his interests in the mathematical foundations of General Relativity. From 2002 to 2013 was Huisken Director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm in Potsdam and also Honorary Professor at the Free University of Berlin and at the University of Tübingen. As of April 2013, he is Director of the Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach and has a professorship at the University of Tübingen. At the MPI for Gravitational Physics, he is an "External Scientific Member".

The second half of the 20th century has seen great progress in mathematical disciplines such as analysis, calculus of variations and geometric measure theory, allowing the rigoros investigation of many nonlinear partial differential equations arising in geometry and mathematical physics that had been inaccessible before. In 1984 Gerhard Huisken showed that the “Mean curvature flow”, a deformation of surfaces in an ambient space in direction of its average curvature acting like a nonlinear heat equation, has the property of smoothing and rounding the shape of the surface in a way that can be controlled in a precise quantitative way. It turned out that this flow has applications to interfaces in phase transitions, to image processing and can even be used to find the exterior horizon of black holes in the context of General Relativity. In 1997 Huisken and Ilmanen used a similar flow of surfaces to prove an energy inequality for black holes that had been conjectured by Roger Penrose many years earlier. At present Gerhard Huisken is working on mathematical concepts for the mass, center of mass and momentum of isolated gravitating systems in general Relativity.

Gerhard Huisken has received the medal of the Australian Mathemtical Society in 1991, the Leibniz prize of the German science foundation DFG in 2003 and the commemorative medal of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University Prague in 2009. He has been elected to the Heidelberg Academy of Science, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and the German National Academy Leopoldina.