Wolfgang Lück
Wolfgang Lück is a German mathematician who is an internationally recognized expert in Algebraic topology.Life and work
After receiving his Abitur from the Ravensberger Gymnasium in Herford in 1975, he studied at the University of Göttingen where he obtained his Diplom in 1981 and his doctoral degree under Tammo tom Dieck in 1984. His thesis was entitled Eine allgemeine Beschreibung für Faserungen auf projektiven Klassengruppen und Whiteheadgruppen.
From 1982 on he was research assistant and from 1985 on he was assistant in Göttingen. In 1989 Lück received his Habilitation. From 1990-91, he was Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. From 1991 until 1996, he was professor at the University of Mainz, and from 1996 until 2010 he taught at the University of Münster. Since 2010 he has been a professor at the University of Bonn. In 2003, he was awarded the Max Planck Research Award and in 2008 the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
Lück has made significant contributions in topology; he and his coauthors resolved many cases of the Farrell-Jones conjecture and the Borel conjecture. He has also contributed to the development of the theory of L2-invariants of manifolds, which were originally introduced by Michael Atiyah and are defined by means of operator algebras. These invariants have applications in group theory and geometry.
In 2009 and 2010 Lück was president of the German Mathematical Society, whose vice president he had been since 2006. From 2011 until 2017, he was Director of the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.Selected publications
- Transformation groups and algebraic K-theory, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Springer, Bd.1408, 1989
- L2-Invariants: Theory and Application to Geometry and K-Theory, Springer, Ergebnisse der Mathematik, 2002
- with Matthias Kreck : The Novikov Conjecture – Geometry and Algebra, Oberwolfach Seminars, Birkhäuser 2004
- Algebraische Topologie: Homologie und Mannigfaltigkeiten, Vieweg 2005
- L2 Invarianten von Mannigfaltigkeiten und Gruppen, Jahresbericht DMV, Bd.99, 1997, Heft 3
- L2 Invariants and their application to geometry, group theory and spectral theory, in „Mathematics Unlimited – 2001 and Beyond“, Springer 2001
- Editor together with F. Thomas Farrell and Lothar Göttsche: Topology of high-dimensional manifolds, ICTP Lecture Notes, 2002
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