Wolfgang Lück (born 19 February 1957 in Herford) is a German mathematician who is an internationally recognized expert in algebraic topology.
Life and work
After receiving his Abitur from the Ravensberger Gymnasium in Herford in 1975, he studied at the University of Göttingen where he obtained his Diplom in 1981 and his doctoral degree under Tammo tom Dieck in 1984. His thesis was entitled Eine allgemeine Beschreibung für Faserungen auf projektiven Klassengruppen und Whiteheadgruppen.
Lück has made significant contributions in topology; he and his coauthors resolved many cases of the Farrell-Jones conjecture and the Borel conjecture. He has also contributed to the development of the theory of L2-invariants (such as L2-Betti numbers and L2-cohomology) of manifolds, which were originally introduced by Michael Atiyah and are defined by means of operator algebras. These invariants have applications in group theory and geometry.
Lück, Wolfgang (1989). Transformation groups and algebraic K-theory. Berlin New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN978-3-540-51846-4. OCLC20860359.
Lück, Wolfgang (2002). L2-Invariants: Theory and Applications to Geometry and K-Theory. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. ISBN978-3-642-07810-1. OCLC851363662.
Algebraische Topologie Homologie und Mannigfaltigkeiten (in German). Wiesbaden: Vieweg+Teubner Verlag. 2005. ISBN978-3-322-80241-5. OCLC863857084.
L2 Invarianten von Mannigfaltigkeiten und Gruppen, Jahresbericht DMV, Bd.99, 1997, Heft 3
Lück, Wolfgang (2001). "L2-Invariants and Their Applications to Geometry, Group Theory and Spectral Theory". Mathematics Unlimited — 2001 and Beyond. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 859–871. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-56478-9_42. ISBN978-3-642-63114-6.