Peter Scholze, Fields Medal 2018

Peter Scholze (born 11 December 1987) is a German mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012, and director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He has been called one of the leading mathematicians in the world. He won the Fields Medal in 2018, which is regarded as the highest professional honour in mathematics.

Early life and education

Scholze was born in Dresden and grew up in Berlin. His father is a physicist, his mother a computer scientist, and his sister studied chemistry. He attended the Heinrich-Hertz-Gymnasium [de] in Berlin-Friedrichshain, a gymnasium devoted to mathematics and science. As a student, Scholze participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad, winning three gold medals and one silver medal.

He studied at the University of Bonn and completed his Bachelor's degree in three semesters and his Master's degree in two further semesters. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2012 under the supervision of Michael Rapoport.

Career

From July 2011 until 2016, Scholze was a Research Fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute in New Hampshire. In 2012 shortly after completing his PhD, he was made full professor at the University of Bonn, becoming the youngest full professor in Germany at the age of 24. In Fall 2014, Scholze was appointed the Chancellor's Professor at University of California, Berkeley, where he taught a course on p-adic geometry. In 2018, Scholze was appointed as a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

Work

Scholze's work has concentrated on purely local aspects of arithmetic geometry such as p-adic geometry and its applications. He presented in a more compact form some of the previous fundamental theories pioneered by Gerd Faltings, Jean-Marc Fontaine and later by Kiran Kedlaya. His PhD thesis on perfectoid spaces yields the solution to a special case of the weight-monodromy conjecture.

Scholze is married to a fellow mathematician and has a daughter.

Awards

• Prix and Cours Peccot (2012)
• SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2013)
• Clay Research Award (2014)
• Cole Prize (2015)
• Fermat Prize (2015)
• Ostrowski Prize (2015)
• EMS Prize (2016)
• Leibniz Prize (2016)
• Berlin-Brandenburg Academy Award (2016)
• Fields Medal (2018)