Michael Weiss (mathematician)

He completed his PhD in 1982 at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Brian Sanderson.[1] He was then affiliated as a researcher with the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies near Paris and the universities of Bielefeld, Edinburgh, and Göttingen. In 1999, he joined the faculty of Aberdeen University where he stayed until 2011, when he was awarded a Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at the University of Münster.[2][3]

His research is on algebraic topology and differential topology. In work with Ib Madsen, he resolved the Mumford Conjecture about rational characteristic classes of surface bundles in the limit as the genus tends to infinity.[4] Building on earlier work of Thomas Goodwillie, he developed Embedding Calculus, a Calculus of functors for embeddings of manifolds.

In 2006, he was awarded the Fröhlich Prize of the London Mathematical Society.[5]

• Madsen, Ib; Weiss, Michael (2007). "The stable moduli space of Riemann surfaces: Mumford's conjecture". Annals of Mathematics. (2). 165 (3): 843–941. arXiv:math/0212321. doi:10.4007/annals.2007.165.843. MR 2335797.
• Galatius, Søren; Tillmann, Ulrike; Madsen, Ib; Weiss, Michael (2009). "The homotopy type of the cobordism category". Acta Mathematica. 202 (2): 195–239. arXiv:math/0605249. doi:10.1007/s11511-009-0036-9. MR 2506750.

• Website at the University of Münster