Richard Schoen

Richard Schoen
250px Richard Schoen (photo by George Bergman)
Born	(1950-10-23) October 23, 1950 Celina, Ohio
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of California, Irvine
Alma mater	Stanford University
Doctoral advisor	Leon Simon Shing-Tung Yau
Doctoral students	Hubert Bray José F. Escobar Robert Kusner Mario Micallef William Minicozzi André Neves
Known for	Differentiable sphere theorem Schoen–Yau conjecture Solution of positive mass conjecture
Notable awards	Bôcher Memorial Prize (1989)

Richard Melvin Schoen (born October 23, 1950) is an American mathematician. Born in Fort Recovery, Ohio, he received his PhD in 1977 from Stanford University. Schoen is currently an Excellence in Teaching Chair at the University of California, Irvine. His surname is pronounced "Shane," perhaps as a reflection of the regional dialect spoken by some of his German ancestors.

Contributions

Schoen has investigated the use of analytic techniques in global differential geometry. In 1979, together with his former doctoral supervisor, Shing-Tung Yau, he proved the fundamental positive energy theorem in general relativity. In 1983, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 1984, he obtained a complete solution to the Yamabe problem on compact manifolds. This work combined new techniques with ideas developed in earlier work with Yau, and partial results by Thierry Aubin and Neil Trudinger. The resulting theorem asserts that any Riemannian metric on a closed manifold may be conformally rescaled (that is, multiplied by a suitable positive function) so as to produce a metric of constant scalar curvature. In 2007, Simon Brendle and Richard Schoen proved the differentiable sphere theorem, a fundamental result in the study of manifolds of positive sectional curvature. He has also made fundamental contributions to the regularity theory of minimal surfaces and harmonic maps.

Awards and honors

For his work on the Yamabe problem, Schoen was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1989. He joined the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2015, he was elected Vice President of the American Mathematical Society.

External links

• Personal web site
• .
• Richard Schoen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project