Submitted by Rose Choi
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In collaboration with András Vasy at Stanford and Plamen Stefanov at Purdue, Gunther has solved the longstanding open problem of boundary rigidity in Riemannian geometry. They prove for Riemannian manifolds with boundary of dimension 3 or greater (under suitable hypotheses) that knowledge of the restriction to the boundary of the manifold’s distance function determines the distance function overall. Their result is featured in an article in Nature whose title suggests potential applications: Long-awaited mathematics proof could help scan Earth's innards.