Humboldt research award winner Karsten Grove coming to MPIM

Karsten Grove, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame, recently received a prestigeous research award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He will use the prize to spend the first half of 2014 in Bonn working with Prof. Werner Ballmann, director at the Max Planck Institute of Mathematics and faculty member of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bonn.

Karsten Grove’s work focuses on modern differential geometry. His contributions cover a wide variety of topics, from closed and isometry invariant geodesics to the construction of important new examples of manifolds of positive curvature. During his stay in Germany, Grove will continue his research on positively curved manifolds and related topics.

Grove is an internationally recognized leader in metric differential geometry and has immensely influenced the growth of modern Riemann geometry. His findings on the non-linear center of mass and critical point theory for distance functions, for example, are now considered basic tools in comparison geometry.

A Denmark native, Karsten Grove earned both a Master of Science and a Lic. Scient. (equivalent to a Ph.D.) from Aarhus University in Denmark. He has edited a number of journals including Acta Mathematica, and extremely well established and prestigious mathematics journal. In 1990 he was also invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians, the largest international congress in the mathematics community, in Kyoto, Japan.

The Humboldt research award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future." Award winners are invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany. The award is valued at 60,000 EUR.