Dietmar Salamon

Dietmar Arno Salamon (7 March 1953 – 4 November 2025) was a German mathematician.

Dietmar Salamon
Born	(1953-03-07)7 March 1953 Bremen, West Germany
Died	4 November 2025(2025-11-04) (aged 72)
Alma mater	Leibniz University Hannover University of Bremen
Awards	Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012) Leroy P. Steele Prize (2017)
Scientific career
Fields	Symplectic topology
Institutions	ETH Zurich University of Warwick
Thesis	On control and observation of neutral systems  (1982)

Life and career

Salamon studied mathematics at the Leibniz University Hannover. In 1982 he earned his doctorate at the University of Bremen with dissertation On control and observation of neutral systems.^[1][2] He subsequently spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed by one year at the Mathematical Research Institute at ETH Zurich. In 1986 he became a lecturer at the University of Warwick, where he was appointed full professor in 1994. The summer semester 1988 he spent as a visiting professor at the University of Bremen and the winter semester 1991 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 1998 to 2018 he was a full professor of mathematics at ETH Zurich, retiring as professor emeritus in 2018.^[3]

Salamon's field of research is symplectic topology and related fields such as symplectic geometry. Symplectic topology is a relatively new field of mathematics that developed into an important branch of mathematics in the 1990s. Some important new techniques are Gromov's pseudoholomorphic curves, Floer homology, and Seiberg-Witten invariants on four-dimensional manifolds.

In 1994 he was an Invited Speaker with talk Lagrangian intersections, 3-manifolds with boundary and the Atiyah-Floer conjecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Zurich. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2017 he received, with Dusa McDuff, the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for the book J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topology, which they co-authored.^[4] He was a member of Academia Europaea from 2011^[5] until his death on 4 November 2025, at the age of 72.^[6]

Selected publications

Books

• Dietmar Salamon: Funktionentheorie. Birkhauser, 2011.
• Dusa McDuff, Dietmar Salamon: J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topology. American Mathematical Society, 2004,^[7] 2nd edition 2012.
• Dusa McDuff, Dietmar Salamon: Introduction to symplectic topology. Oxford University Press, 1998.^[8]
• Dusa McDuff: ${\displaystyle J}$-holomorphic curves and quantum cohomology. American Mathematical Soc. 1994. ISBN 978-0-8218-0332-5.^[9]

Articles

• Dietmar Salamon: Symplectic Geometry. Cambridge University Press, 1994 (London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes), ISBN 0-521-44699-6.
• Helmut Hofer, Dietmar Salamon: Floer homology and Novikov rings. The Floer memorial volume, 483–524, Progr. Math., 133, Birkhäuser, Basel, 1995. (proof of the Arnold conjecture for ${\displaystyle c_{1}\mid _{\pi _{2}M}=0}$) doi:10.1007/978-3-0348-9217-9_20
• Andreas Floer, Helmut Hofer, Dietmar Salamon: Transversality in elliptic Morse theory for the symplectic action. Duke Math. J. 80 (1995), no. 1, 251–292.
• Joel Robbin, Dietmar Salamon: The spectral flow and the Maslov index. Bull. London Math. Soc. 27 (1995), no. 1, 1–33.
• Stamatis Dostoglou, Dietmar Salamon: Self-dual instantons and holomorphic curves. Ann. of Math. (2) 139 (1994), no. 3, 581–640. doi:10.2307/2118573
• Joel Robbin, Dietmar Salamon: The Maslov index for paths. Topology 32 (1993), no. 4, 827–844.
• Dietmar Salamon, Eduard Zehnder: Morse theory for periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems and the Maslov index. Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 45 (1992), no. 10, 1303–1360. doi:10.1002/cpa.3160451004
• Dietmar Salamon: Infinite-dimensional linear systems with unbounded control and observation: a functional analytic approach. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 300 (1987), no. 2, 383–431. doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1987-0876460-7