Tom Ilmanen (born 1961) is an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry and the calculus of variations.
[1] He obtained his PhD in 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley with Lawrence Craig Evans as supervisor.
[2] Ilmanen and Gerhard Huisken used inverse mean curvature flow to prove the Riemannian Penrose conjecture, which is the fifteenth problem in Yau's list of open problems,[3] and was resolved at the same time in greater generality by Hubert Bray using alternative methods.
[4] In 2001, Huisken and Ilmanen made a conjecture on the mathematics of general relativity, about the curvature in spaces with very little mass.
This[clarification needed] was proved in 2023 by Conghan Dong and Antoine Song.