Life

He was an undergraduate student at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and received the degree Diplom-Mathematiker in 1982. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley and undertook Ph. D. work on monopoles on 3-manifolds, under the supervision of Clifford Taubes; but he did not complete it when interrupted by his obligatory alternative service in Germany. He received his Ph. D. (Dr. phil.) at Bochum in 1984, under the supervision of Eduard Zehnder.

Floer’s first pivotal contribution was a solution of a special case of Arnold's conjecture on fixed points of a symplectomorphism. Because of his work on Arnold's conjecture and his development of instanton homology, he achieved wide recognition and was invited as a plenary speaker for the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Kyoto in August 1990. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1989.

In 1988 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and was promoted to Full Professor of Mathematics in 1990. From 1990 he was Professor of Mathematics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, until his unanticipated sudden suicide.