Oliver Edtmair

Oliver Edtmair received his PhD in 2024 from UC Berkeley, where he worked under the supervision of Michael Hutchings. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies at the ETH Zürich. Oliver has been appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for three years beginning 1 July 2026. 

Edtmair employs tools from symplectic topology to tackle fundamental problems arising in dynamical systems. In collaboration with various coauthors, he has made significant contributions to symplectic dynamics and continuous symplectic topology. Notably, he was a key contributor to the proof of the Smooth Closing Lemma for area-preserving surface diffeomorphisms, which resolved a foundational problem originating in the 1960s that was for a long time seen as one of the central open questions in dynamical systems. He has also made substantial progress on a problem posed by Arnold in 1973, related to fluid dynamics, that concerns the topological extension of helicity, a conserved quantity for the three-dimensional Euler equations. His extensive portfolio of achievements also includes the resolution of celebrated questions from the 1990s regarding Hamiltonian dynamics on convex hypersurfaces in Euclidean space.