Fernando Codá Marques

Fernando Codá Marques was born in 1979. He studied at Universidade Federal de Alagoas in Brazil and at the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2003 under supervision of José Escobar. Since 2003 he works at IMPA and in September 2014 he will become a professor of Princeton University.

His research interests are differential geometry, geometric PDEs and general relativity. Together with André Neves in 2012 he solved the celebrated Willmore conjecture (1965) by introducing min-max methods to the problem. Earlier he had contributed (in papers with collaborators Brendle, Khuri and Schoen) to the solution of the compactness conjecture in the Yamabe problem for spin manifolds, due to Richard Schoen, showing that it holds in dimensions up to 24 and fails in higher dimensions. He also constructed counterexamples to the Min-Oo's conjecture in general relativity (with Brendle and Neves), and proved the connectedness of the space of metrics with positive scalar curvature in three dimensions, using the work of Perelman on Ricci flow.

Fernando Codá Marques was the winner in 2012 of the Ramanujan Prize, the TWAS Prize and the UMALCA Prize. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad in 2010 and will be a plenary speaker at ICM 2014 in Seoul. In 2014 he became a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.