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Peter Scholze

German mathematician; Director, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn; 2018 Fields Medalist
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics · Bonn, Germany · academic
Fields Medal (2018)Three-time IMO Gold Medalist For Germany (2005, 2006, 2007) And Silver (2004)Introduced Perfectoid Spaces (PhD Thesis, 2012)Youngest Full Professor In Germany At Age 24 (Bonn, 2012)Director At The Max Planck Institute For Mathematics Since 2018

Peter Scholze (born 11 December 1987, Dresden) is a German mathematician and one of the most influential figures in modern arithmetic geometry. He won three gold medals and one silver for Germany at the International Mathematical Olympiad (2004-2007), including a perfect 42/42 score in 2005. After a record-fast University of Bonn degree run he completed his PhD in 2012 under Michael Rapoport with a thesis introducing perfectoid spaces, and was made a full professor at Bonn the same year, aged 24. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2018 'for the revolution that he launched in arithmetic geometry,' and has since been a Scientific Member and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. His work includes perfectoid spaces and diamonds, prismatic cohomology (with Bhargav Bhatt), condensed mathematics (with Dustin Clausen), and the geometrization of the local Langlands conjectures (with Laurent Fargues).

German mathematician working in arithmetic geometry and p-adic geometry. Three-time IMO gold medalist (2005 perfect score) and 2018 Fields Medalist, cited for launching a revolution in arithmetic geometry. Professor at the University of Bonn and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.

Details
LocationBonn, Germany
Company sitempim-bonn.mpg.de
UniversityUniversity of Bonn
Arithmetic geometryAlgebraic geometryAlgebraic number theoryPerfectoid spacesp-adic geometryCondensed mathematicsPrismatic cohomologyLocal Langlands programMathematicsNumber theory
Notes
  • Awarded the 2018 Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, cited 'for the revolution that he launched in arithmetic geometry'; at 30 he was among the youngest medalists ever.Aug 1, 2018
  • Developed prismatic cohomology with Bhargav Bhatt, unifying singular, de Rham, l-adic and crystalline cohomology and framed as progress toward motivic cohomology — the field's long-standing unification problem.2019
  • Appointed Scientific Member and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in July 2018, the same month he received the Fields Medal — the institutional leadership role and the field's top honour arrived together.Jul 2018
  • Awarded the Leibniz Prize (2016), the Clay Research Award (2014), the Cole Prize in Algebra (2015), the Fermat Prize (2015), the Ostrowski Prize (2015) and the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2013) in a dense pre-Fields run — a near-sweep of the discipline's major mid-career prizes.2016
  • Completed a Bonn bachelor's in three semesters and a master's in two more, then a PhD in 2012 under Michael Rapoport; this compressed timeline is what made the age-24 full professorship possible rather than a merely early one.2012
  • Made full professor at the University of Bonn in 2012 at age 24, reportedly the youngest full professor in Germany — the appointment and his perfectoid-spaces breakthrough theory landed the same year.2012
  • His 2011/2012 perfectoid spaces thesis solved a special case of the weight-monodromy conjecture — the result that first established him as more than a talent, condensed into a single construction.2012
  • Won a perfect 42/42 (rank 1 overall) at the 2005 IMO and placed 2nd in 2007 (36 pts) and 6th in 2006 (35 pts), after a silver in 2004 (31 pts) as a newcomer — the arc from 31 to a perfect score in one year marks him as an outlier even among olympiad golds.2007
  • Public contact is scholarly and institutional rather than personal: email [contact omitted] and MPIM office phone +49 228 402-206, with no verified personal social accounts — reaching him means going through the institute.2026
  • Drafted the condensed mathematics program with Dustin Clausen, reworking the foundations of topological algebra — a collaboration that shows his influence extends beyond his own single-author output.2019
  • Clay Research Fellow from July 2011 to 2016 and Chancellor's Professor at UC Berkeley in fall 2014; the Berkeley term is his only sustained period outside Germany, and he returned to Bonn rather than staying in the US.2014
  • His doctoral lineage runs Rapoport -> Deligne -> Grothendieck -> Schwartz, making Scholze part of a chain in which four generations are Fields medalists — a rare pedigree that situates him in the Grothendieck tradition.2012

Competition record

Germany · IMO

2004 · Silver · Rank 462005 · Gold · Rank 12006 · Gold · Rank 62007 · Gold · Rank 2