Robert Osserman

Raised in Bronx, he went to Bronx High School of Science (diploma, 1942) and New York University. He earned a Ph.D. in 1955 from Harvard University with the thesis Contributions to the Problem of Type (on Riemann surfaces) supervised by Lars Ahlfors.

He joined Stanford University in 1955. He joined the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 1990. He worked on geometric function theory, differential geometry, the two integrated in a theory of minimal surfaces, isoperimetric inequality, and other issues in the areas of astronomy, geometry, cartography and complex function theory.

Osserman was the head of mathematics at Office of Naval Research, a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Paris and Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Warwick. He edited numerous books and promoted mathematics, such as in interviews with celebrities Steve Martin and Alan Alda.

He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) of 1978 in Helsinki.

He received the Lester R. Ford Award (1980) of the Mathematical Association of America for his popular science writings.

H. Blaine Lawson, David Allen Hoffman and Michael Gage were Ph.D. students of his.

Robert Osserman died on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at his home.

Mathematical contributions

Non-existence for the minimal surface system in higher codimension

In collaboration with his former student H. Blaine Lawson, Osserman studied the minimal surface problem in the case that the codimension is larger than one. They considered the case of a graphical minimal submanifold of euclidean space. Their conclusion was that most of the analytical properties which hold in the codimension-one case fail to extend. Solutions to the boundary value problem may exist and fail to be unique, or in other situations may simply fail to exist. Such submanifolds (given as graphs) might not solve the Plateau problem, as they must in the case of graphical hypersurfaces of Euclidean space.

Their results pointed to the analytical difficulty of general elliptic systems and of the minimal submanifold problem in particular. Many of these issues are still not understood, despite their significance in the theory of calibrated geometry and the Strominger–Yau–Zaslow conjecture.