Gerd Faltings

Career and research

In 1981, he obtained the venia legendi in mathematics from the University of Münster, where he was an assistant professor. He was a professor at the University of Wuppertal from 1982 to 1984 and Princeton University from 1985 to 1994. In the autumn of 1988 and in the academic year 1992–1993, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1986 for proving the Tate conjecture for Abelian varieties over number fields, the Shafarevich conjecture for Abelian varieties over number fields and the Mordell conjecture, which states that any non-singular projective curve of genus g > 1 defined over a number field K contains only finitely many K-rational points.

In 1994, as an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians he gave a talk Mumford-Stabilität in der algebraischen Geometrie (lit. 'Mumford stability in algebraic geometry'). Extending methods of Paul Vojta, he proved the Mordell–Lang conjecture, which is a generalization of the Mordell conjecture. Together with Gisbert Wüstholz, he re-proved Roth's theorem, for which Roth had been awarded the Fields medal in 1958.

He returned to Germany the same year, and from 1994 to 2018, he was a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 1996, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Faltings has been the formal supervisor of over a dozen PhD students, including Shinichi Mochizuki, Wiesława Nizioł, and Nikolai Durov.

On 19 March 2026, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced Faltings as the winner of the Abel Prize, "for introducing powerful tools in arithmetic geometry and resolving long-standing diophantine conjectures of Mordell and Lang." He is the first German mathematician to have received both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize.

Personal life

Faltings married Angelika Tschimmel in 1984; she died in 2011.