Jeff Cheeger


Jeff Cheeger, is a mathematician. Cheeger is professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in New York City. His main interests are differential geometry and its connections with topology and analysis.

Biography

Cheeger graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in 1964. He graduated from Princeton University with an M.S. in 1966 and with a Ph.D. in 1967. He is a Silver Professor at the Courant Institute at New York University where he has worked since 1993.
He worked as a teaching assistant and research assistant at Princeton University from 1966–1967, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow and instructor from 1967–1968, an assistant professor from 1968 to 1969 at the University of Michigan, and an associate professor from 1969–1971 at SUNY at Stony Brook. Cheeger was a professor at SUNY, Stony Brook from 1971 to 1985, a leading professor from 1985 to 1990, and a distinguished professor from 1990 until 1992.
Cheeger has also had a number of visiting positions in Brazil, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.
He has supervised at least 13 doctoral theses and three postdoctoral fellows. He has served as a member of several American Mathematical Society committees and National Science Foundation panels.
Cheeger delivered invited addresses at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1974 and in 1986.
He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984. In 1998 Cheeger was elected a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Cheeger was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1997. His election citation read:
Cheeger has discovered many of the deepest results in Riemannian geometry, such as estimates for the spectrum of the Laplace-Beltrami operator, and the identity of the analytic and geometric definitions of torsion, and has led to the solution of problems in topology, graph theory, number theory, and Markov processes.

He received the fourteenth Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry from the American Mathematical Society in 2001.

Honors and awards