Dietmar Salamon

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

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]

• 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]

• 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

• Literature by and about Dietmar Salamon in the German National Library catalogue
• "GIT and µµ-GIT - Dietmar Salamon". YouTube. Institute for Advanced Study. 11 August 2018. (See geometric invariant theory (GIT).)