Interrupted by 15 months of obligatory military service, he received his PhD in mathematics in 1978.

As a Fields Medalist he gave an ICM plenary talk Recent progress in arithmetic algebraic geometry.

In 1994 as an ICM invited speaker in Zurich he gave a talk Mumford-Stabilität in der algebraischen Geometrie.

In 1996, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.

Faltings has been the formal supervisor of over a dozen students, including Shinichi Mochizuki,[1] Wieslawa Niziol,[2] and Nikolai Dourov.