Herbert Federer

Herbert Federer (July 23, 1920 – April 21, 2010) was an American mathematician. He is one of the creators of geometric measure theory, at the meeting point of differential geometry and mathematical analysis.

Federer was born July 23, 1920, in Vienna, Austria. After emigrating to the US in 1938, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning the Ph.D. as a student of Anthony Morse in 1944. He then spent virtually his entire career as a member of the Brown University Mathematics Department, where he eventually retired with the title of Professor Emeritus.

Federer wrote more than thirty research papers in addition to his book Geometric measure theory. The Mathematics Genealogy Project assigns him nine Ph.D. students and well over a hundred subsequent descendants. His most productive students include the late Frederick J. Almgren, Jr. (1933–1997) a professor at Princeton for 35 years, and his last student, Robert Hardt, now at Rice University.

Federer was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1987, he and his Brown colleague Wendell Fleming won the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize "for their pioneering work in Normal and Integral currents."

Federer's mathematical work separates thematically into the periods before and after his watershed 1960 paper Normal and integral currents, co-authored with Fleming. That paper provided the first satisfactory general solution to Plateau's problem — the problem of finding a (k+1)-dimensional least-area surface spanning a given k-dimensional boundary cycle in n-dimensional Euclidean space. Their solution inaugurated a new and fruitful period of research on a large class of geometric variational problems — especially minimal surfaces — via what came to be known as Geometric Measure Theory.

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