Peter Scholze became Germany's youngest full professor at 24, then won a Fields Medal
Peter Scholze finished a Bonn bachelor's degree in three semesters and a master's in two more. Shortly after his doctorate in 2012, the university made him a full professor at 24, the youngest in Germany. Six years later he received the Fields Medal, joining a line of teachers stretching back through Grothendieck.
Born in Dresden in 1987 and raised in Berlin, Scholze grew up with a physicist father, a computer scientist mother and a sister who studied chemistry. He attended a Berlin school specialising in mathematics and science and collected three gold medals and a silver at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
His doctoral adviser at Bonn was Michael Rapoport. Rapoport studied under Pierre Deligne, Deligne under Alexander Grothendieck, and Grothendieck under Laurent Schwartz, and every one of those four apart from Rapoport has won a Fields Medal, now including Scholze himself. The prize committee in 2018 cited his perfectoid spaces, a framework he introduced in his thesis for studying geometry over the p-adic numbers, a number system built around divisibility by a chosen prime. That thesis also settled a special case of a long-standing problem called the weight-monodromy conjecture.
He has since pushed into foundations. With Bhargav Bhatt he developed prismatic cohomology, which draws several older ways of measuring the shape of spaces into one theory, and with Dustin Clausen he proposed a programme called condensed mathematics. Along the way he held a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellowship, taught p-adic geometry at Berkeley in 2014, and in 2018 joined the directors of Bonn's Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.
Honours came quickly, including the Cole Prize in Algebra and the Leibniz Prize, but in 2016 he turned down a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize worth $100,000, part of the Breakthrough awards, a refusal that drew press attention. He was thirty when the Fields Medal arrived, one of the youngest recipients ever.
Source: Peter Scholze
