Dietmar Salamon: farewell lecture

Laudatio by Mete Soner, Head of Department:

Good evening everyone

Welcome to the farewell lecture of professor Dietmar Salamon.

Dietmar Salamon was born in Bremen of post-war Germany in 1953. He grew up with his family and did most of his schooling, in fact all of his schooling in his home town, graduating with a PhD from the University of Bremen in 1982. Then he moved on to the University of Wisconsin located in the beautiful town of Madison in the midwest of the USA. His work on his doctoral studies was on optimal control and was done under the supervision of Diederich Hinrichsen. But in Wisconsin he found new topics of mathematics and he moved his research agenda in different directions. Afterwards in 1986 he joined the University of Warwick, became a full professor there in 1994. He left Warwick 20 years ago in 1998 to move to ETH Zurch – and he has been with us since then.

Like in his personal life or personal journey Dietmar had an interesting journey in mathematics as well. After his fundamental contributions to control theory during his PhD studies, he became interested in dynamical systems and differential geometry. Later he moved to the world of symplectic topology and he became one of the founders of the symplectic world. He is also internationally renowned for his contributions not only to symplectic topology, but also to geometry and analysis. In 1994 he was an invited speaker here in Zurich at the International Congress of Mathematicians and he has given two invited addresses to the European Congress of Mathematics, one in 1992 and one in 2000.

I was told by Paul Biran, his close friend, that the scientific turning point in Dietmar’s career was in a differential geometry course, taught by Joel Robbin, which was then an important trigger for the rest of his career – this happened in Madison and there Charlie Conley was present and influenced his further studies as well. Another important figure in his career was Jürgen Moser who was at ETH at that time.

Dietmar made many contributions to mathematics, to list a few: the solution of the Atiyah-Floer Conjecture is one, the symplectic theory of vortex equations, that he developed by himself, is another and his recent studies on the questions arising from infinite dimensional geometric invariant theory. In addition to his influential research papers he has also written important and very well-read books; in fact, two of his books, "Introduction to symplectic topology" and "J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topology” that he co-authored with Dusa McDuff are widely excepted today as the standard references on these subjects.