Simon Brendle

Simon Brendle (born June 1981) is a German-American mathematician working in differential geometry and nonlinear partial differential equations.

He received his Dr. rer. nat. from Tübingen University under the supervision of Gerhard Huisken (2001).

He was a professor at Stanford University (2005–2016), and is currently a professor at Columbia University.

He has held visiting positions at MIT, ETH Zürich, Princeton University, and Cambridge University.

Simon Brendle has solved major open problems regarding the Yamabe equation in conformal geometry.

This includes his counterexamples to the compactness conjecture for the Yamabe problem, and the proof of the convergence of the Yamabe flow in all dimensions (conjectured by Richard Hamilton).

He received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2006.

In 2007, he proved the differentiable sphere theorem (in collaboration with Richard Schoen), a fundamental problem in global differential geometry.

In 2012, he proved the Hsiang–Lawson's conjecture, a longstanding problem in minimal surface theory.

He has also worked on singularity formation in the mean curvature flow and Ricci flow, solving a question concerning the uniqueness of self-similar solutions to the Ricci flow which arose in the context of Grigori Perelman's work.

For his contributions to differential geometry he was awarded an EMS Prize in 2012.

He delivered the 2012 Euler Lecture and the 2011 Takagi Lectures.

He was named as the recipient of the 2014 Bôcher Prize of the American Mathematical Society.

In 2017, he received a Simons Investigator Award and the Fermat Prize.

In 2023, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.