Prof. Dr. Tom Ilmanen

Tom Ilmanen has been full Professor for Mathematics at the ETH Zurich since January 1999.

Tom Ilmanen, whose family stems from Connecticut, Louisiana, the Netherlands, and Finland, was born on June 11, 1961, in Washington, D.C. He studied mathematics at Haverford College and the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D. under Professor L. C. Evans in 1991. He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, followed by three years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in 1993. In 1995, he took up a post as Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, where he won a Sloan Foundation Fellowship. Thereafter he spent eighteen months at the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Leipzig.

Tom Ilmanen's research work is in the area of geometry, partial differential equations, and the calculus of variations. He is particularly interested in weak solutions of geometric evolutions equations, such as the motion of surfaces by their mean curvature, the Ricci flow, and their sister equations in mathematical physics. In 1996, Gerhard Huisken and he began to apply curvature evolution methods to the Penrose Inequality of general relativity.