Tobias Colding

Who is Tobias Colding?

Tobias Holck Colding is a Danish mathematician. He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to Torben Holck Colding and Benedicte Holck Colding. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1992 at the University of Pennsylvania under Chris Croke. Since 2005 Colding has been a professor of mathematics at MIT. He was on the faculty at the Courant Institute of New York University in various positions from 1992 to 2008. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT and at Princeton University and a postdoctoral fellow at MSRI.

In the early stage of his career, Colding did impressive work on manifolds with bounds on Ricci curvature. In 1995 he presented this work at the Geometry Festival. He began working with Jeff Cheeger while at NYU. He gave a 45-minute invited address to the ICM on this work in 1998 in Berlin. He began coauthoring with William P. Minnicozzi at this time: first on harmonic functions and later on minimal surfaces. He gave an AMS Lecture at University of Tennessee. He also gave an invited address at the first AMS-Scandinavian International meeting in Odense, Denmark, in 2000 and an invited address at the Germany Mathematics Meeting in 2003 in Rostock. He gave the 2008 Mordell Lecture at the University of Cambridge and will give the 2010 Cantrell Lectures at University of Georgia. Since 2008 he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and since 2006 a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and also since 2006 an honorary professor of University of Copenhagen, Denmark.