In 1981, he obtained the in mathematics from the
University of Münster, where he was an
assistant professor. He was a
professor at the
University of Wuppertal from 1982 to 1984 and
Princeton University from 1985 to 1994. In the autumn of 1988 and in the
academic year 1992–1993, he was a
visiting scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study. He was awarded the
Fields Medal in 1986 for proving the
Tate conjecture for
Abelian varieties over
number fields, the
Shafarevich conjecture for Abelian varieties over number fields and the
Mordell conjecture, which states that any non-singular
projective curve of genus
g > 1 defined over a number field
K contains only finitely many
K-rational points. In 1994, as an
invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians he gave a talk (). Extending methods of
Paul Vojta, he proved the
Mordell–Lang conjecture, which is a generalization of the Mordell conjecture. Together with
Gisbert Wüstholz, he re-proved
Roth's theorem, for which Roth had been awarded the Fields medal in 1958. He returned to Germany the same year, and from 1994 to 2018, he was a director of the
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in
Bonn. In 1996, he received the
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Faltings has been the formal supervisor of over a dozen
PhD students, including
Shinichi Mochizuki, On 19 March 2026, the
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced Faltings as the winner of the
Abel Prize, "for introducing powerful tools in
arithmetic geometry and resolving long-standing
diophantine conjectures of
Mordell and
Lang." He is the first German mathematician to have received both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize. ==Personal life==