FALTINGS, GERD

born July 28, 1954, Gelsenkirchen, W.Ger. German mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1986 for his work in algebra. Faltings attended the Westphalian Wilhelm University of Mnster (Ph.D., 1978). Following a visiting research fellowship at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. (197879), he held appointments at Mnster (197982), the University of Wuppertal (198284), Princeton (N.J.) University (198596), and, from 1996, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. Faltings was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley, Calif., U.S., in 1986, primarily for his proof of the Mordell conjecture. In 1922 Louis Mordell had conjectured that a system of algebraic equations with rational coefficients that defines an algebraic curve of genus greater than or equal to 2 has only a finite number of rational solutions. By proving this Faltings showed that the equation of Fermat's last theorem, xn + yn = zn, could have only a finite number of solutions in integers for n > 2, a major step forward in the proof of the Fermat conjecture that there are no solutions for n > 2. Faltings' publications include Rational Points (1984); with Ching-Li Chai, Degeneration of Abelian Varieties (1990); and Lectures on the Arithmetic Riemann-Roch Theorem (1992).