Prof. em. Dr. Eduard Zehnder

Eduard Zehnder was appointed Full Professor of Mathematics at the ETH Zurich in 1987. He retired end of March 2006.

Eduard Zehnder was born in Leuggern, Switzerland, on Nov. 10, 1940. He studied mathematics and physics at the ETH Zurich. In 1971 he finished his studies with a doctorate in theoretical physics. His thesis advisor was Prof. Dr. Res Jost. There followed a postgraduate year at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York (1971/72) and a two year membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1972-74). After returning to Europe in 1974 he became a lecturer at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. In 1976 he accepted a professorship in the department of mathematics of the Ruhr Universität Bochum (RUB). In 1977 he was appointed to the Chair for Analysis at the RUB, a position he held until 1986 when he became Director of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule in Aachen.

His fields of interest were non linear analysis, dynamical systems and symplectic geometry. His contributions concerned stability and instability phenomena in Hamiltionian systems, global periodic phenomena systems and related symplectic invariants.