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Robert Jeffrey Zimmer (November 5, 1947 – May 23, 2023) was an American mathematician and academic administrator. From 2006 until 2021, he served as the 13th president of the University of Chicago and as the Chair of the Board for Argonne National Lab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. He then served as chancellor of the University of Chicago until July 2022. As a mathematician, Zimmer specialized in geometry, particularly ergodic theory, , and differential geometry.
Under Zimmer's administration applications to the undergraduate College increased from under 10,000 in 2006 to over 32,000 in 2018. The University adopted a policy of meeting full financial need of its undergraduate students with no loan expectations, creating the capacity for them to graduate debt-free. Recent efforts to increase access to the University include UChicago Promise, which provides aid and college guidance to students in the city of Chicago; the Neubauer Family Adelante Programs, which offers financial support for students engaged in Hispanic/Latino communities; the UChicago Emerging Rural Leaders Program, which offers on-campus programming, mentoring, and financial aid for students from rural communities; and the Office for Military-Affiliated Communities, which supports programs and partnerships for recruitment, enrollment and other services for veterans and their dependents.
During Zimmer's tenure the University of Chicago received six gifts of $100 million or more (totaling $850M): an anonymous $100 million donation to fund the undergraduate Odyssey scholarship program; a $300 million donation to the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; a $100 million donation to establish The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts and The Pearson Global Forum at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies; a $150 million for the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics; $100 million for the Duchossois Family Institute: Harnessing the Microbiome and Immunity for Human Health; and a $100 million donation to initially establish and fund the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
In 2014, Zimmer formed the Committee on Freedom of Expression whose report came to be known as the Chicago principles, a set of guidelines intended to demonstrate The University of Chicago's commitment to freedom of speech. The Chicago Principles were adopted by more than 65 colleges and universities. As Zimmer noted in an address to the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2017, the work of faculty and students to confront new and different ideas through education and research "only happens at the highest level in an environment of rigor, questioning, and free and open discourse." Zimmer also spoke on the importance of these ideas in the keynote address at the University of Vienna's Academic Freedom in the Digital Age conference.
Under Zimmer's guidance, the University of Chicago sent a letter to incoming freshmen in August 2016 telling them that "we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own." Why the University of Chicago Opposes 'Trigger Warnings' by Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal , February 20, 2017
An Associated Press report found Zimmer to be the highest-paid college president in the United States in 2011, with total compensation of $3.4 million in that year.
On August 13, 2020, Zimmer announced that he would step down as president at the conclusion of the 2020–2021 academic year and that he would shift to the role of chancellor; he originally had planned to serve through 2022, but acknowledged that brain surgery he had undergone in May 2020 had accelerated his transition. On July 7, 2022, he stepped down from his role as chancellor to focus on his health.
Crucial to this program is "Zimmer's cocycle superrigidity theorem", a generalization of Grigory Margulis's superrigidity. Like Margulis's work, which greatly influenced Zimmer, it uses ergodic theory as a central technique in the case of invariant measures. It led to many results within the Zimmer Program, although many of the main conjectures remain open. In addition to Margulis, Zimmer was greatly influenced by the work of Mikhail Gromov on rigid transformation groups and he extended and connected Gromov's theory to the Zimmer Program.
Zimmer collaborated with a number of mathematicians to apply the ideas from the Zimmer Program to other areas of mathematics. His collaboration with Alexander Lubotzky applied some of these ideas to arithmetic results on fundamental groups of manifolds. In collaboration with François Labourie and Shahar Mozes, cocycle superrigidity ideas were applied to the basic problem of the existence of compact locally homogeneous spaces of certain types. His collaboration with Amos Nevo concerned actions with stationary measure and provided certain basic structure theorems for such actions of higher rank semisimple groups. Zimmer's earlier work provided a proof of a conjecture of Alain Connes on orbit equivalence of actions of semisimple groups, and introduced the basic notion of amenable group action.
Zimmer was diagnosed with glioblastoma in May 2020. He died in Chicago on May 23, 2023, at age 75.
Personal life
Zimmer was married to Terese Schwartzman, former director of strategic initiatives for the university's Urban Education Institute, but they separated in September 2009 and later divorced. They had three sons. In October 2011, he married University of Chicago classics professor Shadi Bartsch.
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Categories: 1947 Births, 2023 Deaths, 20th-century American Mathematicians, 21st-century American Mathematicians, Brandeis University Alumni, Fellows Of The American Mathematical Society, Harvard Graduate School Of Arts And Sciences Alumni, Mathematicians From New York, Presidents Of The University Of Chicago, Stuyvesant High School Alumni, University Of Chicago Faculty, Deaths From Glioblastoma, Deaths From Cancer In Illinois
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