Professor Fernando Codá Marques was named one of four 2020 Simons Investigators in Mathematics, along with Alexei Borodin (MIT), Ciprian Manolescu (Stanford), and Zhiwei Yun (MIT).
The citations notes 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.