Fernando Codá Marques

In 2021 he was awarded the Fermat Prize, "for major advances obtained with André Neves on geometric applications of the calculus of variations".

In 2020 he received a Simons Investigator Award. The citation reads: "His recent work, in collaboration with André Neves, developed a full Morse theory for the area functional in closed Riemannian manifolds. The ideas introduced by them have revitalized the subject, leading to the discovery that closed minimal surfaces are ubiquitous in these spaces."

He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

In December 2017, in cooperation with Kei Irie and André Neves, he solved Yau's conjecture (Yau, 1982) in the generic case.

He shared the 2016 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry with André Neves, "for their remarkable work on variational problems in differential geometry [including] the proof of the Willmore conjecture.".

He worked at IMPA from 2003 to 2014. On 1 September 2014, Codá Marques joined Princeton University as a full professor.

In 2014 he gave the Łojasiewicz Lecture (on "The min-max theory of minimal surfaces and applications") at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

He is a full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences since 2014.

Codá Marques and Neves "Min-max theory and the Willmore conjecture" was uploaded to arXiv in February 2012, in it they solved the Willmore conjecture, using Almgren–Pitts min-max theory, which was then "a relatively old tool and already somewhat out of favor". According to Harold Rosenberg, using this tool was possible because the pair discovered a connection between objects that were apparently very different: "connecting the problem with questions about minimal surfaces on the sphere [...] a priori there would be no reason for these things to be connected. It's curious, very curious.", the solution to the Willmore conjecture (Willmore, 1965)

In May 2012, in cooperation with Ian Agol and André Neves, Marques provided the solution to the Freedman–He–Wang conjecture (Freedman–He–Wang, 1994)

He was awarded the ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2012, "in recognition of his several outstanding contributions to differential geometry".

In April 2010, in cooperation with Simon Brendle and André Neves, Marques provided a counter-example to the rigidity conjecture of Min-Oo.

He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) of 2010 in Hyderabad (on "Scalar curvature, conformal geometry, and the Ricci flow with surgery"), and a plenary speaker at the ICM of 2014 in Seoul (on "Minimal surfaces – variational theory and applications").

In 2009, together with Richard Schoen and Marcus Khuri he did important work on the Yamabe problem. He solved Schoen's conjecture on compactness in the Yamabe problem for spin manifolds.

In 2001, Codá Marques was awarded Cornell's Battig Prize for graduate students, for "excellence and promise in mathematics". He obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2003, under the supervision of José F. Escobar (thesis: Existence and Compactness Theorems on Conformal Deformation of Metrics).

He obtained a master's degree from the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in 1999. Among his teachers at the IMPA were Manfredo do Carmo and Elon Lages Lima.

Codá Marques started as a student of civil engineering at the Federal University of Alagoas in 1996, but switched to mathematics after two years.

Fernando Codá dos Santos Cavalcanti Marques (born 8 October 1979) is a Brazilian mathematician working mainly in geometry, topology, partial differential equations and Morse theory. He is a professor at Princeton University. In 2012, together with André Neves, he proved the Willmore conjecture.

Fernando Codá Marques was born on 8 October 1979 in São Carlos and grew up in Maceió. His parents were both professors of engineering.