Richard Streit Hamilton was born in 1943. He studied at Yale University and then in Princeton where he received his Ph.D. in 1966 with R. Gunning as the advisor. He held positions at UC Irvine, UC San Diego and Cornell University. Presently he is a professor at Columbia University.

R. Hamilton's field is differential geometry. He introduced the Ricci flow – a deformation of the Riemannian metric governed by a differential equation in which the change of the metric tensor is proportional to its Ricci curvature tensor. Hamilton proved many important properties of the flow such as: short time existence, evolution equations for the curvature tensors, preservation of the positive Ricci curvature, curvature blow-up at the critical time and convergence criterion for (rescaled) Ricci flow at the that time. He  obtained the Ricci curvature control using a tensor version of the Harnack inequality along the Ricci flow. Further he  proposed a program how to use the Ricci flow approach and a careful study of its singularity formation to solve the  Poincaré conjecture. The program led to the proof obtained by G. Perelman.

The list of his awards and prizes includes the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (1996), Clay Research Award (2003), L. P. Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research (2009). He is a member of National Academy of Sciences since 1999 and
of American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2003.

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So, 30 kwi 2011 15:52:04 +0000