Matthias Kreck

In 1970 he submitted his diploma in Mathematics in Bonn and in 1972 he received his doctorate there under the supervision of Friedrich Hirzebruch, with a thesis titled An invariant for stably parallelized manifolds.

He was also a guest researcher at places including Paris, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, Aarhus, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Beijing.

In his habilitation in 1977 he managed the complete classification of closed smooth manifolds with diffeomorphisms up to bordism: a problem that had already been worked on by René Thom, William Browder and Dennis Sullivan.

[3] Among his PhD students is Peter Teichner,[4] presently a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

In February 2011 following the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal, he initiated a "declaration of university professors on academic standards"[5] and the accompanying petition.