Dietmar Salamon


Dietmar Arno Salamon is a German mathematician.

Education and career

Salamon studied mathematician at the Leibniz University Hannover. In 1982 he earned his doctorate at the University of Bremen with dissertation On control and observation of neutral systems. He subsequently spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed by one year at the Mathematical Research Institute at ETH Zurich. In 1986 he became a lecturer at the University of Warwick, where he was appointed full professor in 1994. The summer semester 1988 he spent as a visiting professor at the University of Bremen and the winter semester 1991 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 1998 to 2018 he was a full professor of mathematics at ETH Zurich, retiring as professor emeritus in 2018.
Salamon's field of research is symplectic topology and related fields such as symplectic geometry. Symplectic topology is a relatively new field of mathematics that developed into an important branch of mathematics in the 1990s. Some important new techniques are Gromov's pseudoholomorphic curves, Floer homology, and Seiberg-Witten invariants on four-dimensional manifolds.
In 1994 he was an Invited Speaker with talk Lagrangian intersections, 3-manifolds with boundary and the Atiyah-Floer conjecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2017 he received, with Dusa McDuff, the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for the book J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topology, which they co-authored. He has been a member of Academia Europaea since 2011.

Selected publications

Books