Gerd Faltings (born July 28, 1954 in Gelsenkirchen-Buer) is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic algebraic geometry.

From 1972 to 1978, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Münster. In 1978 he received his PhD in mathematics and in 1981 he got the venia legendi (Habilitation) in mathematics, both from the University of Münster. During this time he was an assistant professor at the University of Münster. From 1982 to 1984, he was professor at the University of Wuppertal. After that he was professor at Princeton University (1985–1994).

He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1986 for proving the Mordell conjecture, which states that any non-singular projective curve of genus g > 1 defined over a number field K contains only finitely many K-rational points.

Since 1995 he has been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 1996, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.

Awards

* Fields Medal (1986)
* Guggenheim Fellowship (1988/89)
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (1996)

Faltings' theorem

External links

• Gerd Faltings at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Gerd Faltings", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Faltings.html .
• Faltings' home page