Dietmar Salamon


Dietmar Arno Salamon was a German mathematician.

Life and career

Salamon studied mathematics 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 was a member of Academia Europaea from 2011 until his death on 4 November 2025, at the age of 72.

Selected publications

Books

Articles

  • Dietmar Salamon: Cambridge University Press, 1994,.
  • Helmut Hofer, Dietmar Salamon: Floer homology and Novikov rings. The Floer memorial volume, 483–524, Progr. Math., 133, Birkhäuser, Basel, 1995.
  • Andreas Floer, Helmut Hofer, Dietmar Salamon: Duke Math. J. 80, no. 1, 251–292.
  • Joel Robbin, Dietmar Salamon: Bull. London Math. Soc. 27, no. 1, 1–33.
  • Stamatis Dostoglou, Dietmar Salamon: Self-dual instantons and holomorphic curves. Ann. of Math. 139, no. 3, 581–640.
  • Joel Robbin, Dietmar Salamon: Topology 32, no. 4, 827–844.
  • Dietmar Salamon, Eduard Zehnder: Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 45, no. 10, 1303–1360.
  • Dietmar Salamon: Infinite-dimensional linear systems with unbounded control and observation: a functional analytic approach. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 300, no. 2, 383–431.