In 1975, he began studying mathematics, physics, economics and philosophy. In 1980 he received a Dr. rer. nat. from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Stefan Hildebrandt [de].[1] In 1984 he was at the University of Bonn for the habilitation. After his habilitation, he was at the Ruhr University Bochum, the chair of Mathematics X, Analysis. During this time he was the coordinator of the project "Stochastic Analysis and systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom" July 1987 to December 1996.
Since 1996, he has been director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. After more than 10 years of work in Bochum, this he followed: "tackle new research problems in the border area between mathematics and the natural sciences and simultaneously encourage mathematical research in Germany, particularly in the fields of geometry and analysis."
In 1998 he was an honorary professor at the University of Leipzig. In 2002, there, he initiated with two other scientists from the Max Planck Institute, the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics (IZBI).
Jost, Jürgen (1983). Harmonic mappings between Riemannian manifolds. Canberra: Centre for Mathematical Analysis, Australian National University. ISBN0-86784-403-5. OCLC13282393.
Jost, Jürgen (1984). "Harmonic Maps Between Surfaces (with a Special Chapter on Conformal Mappings)". Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Vol. 1062. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/bfb0100160. ISBN978-3-540-13339-1. ISSN0075-8434.
Jost, Jürgen (1988). Nonlinear Methods in Riemannian and Kählerian Geometry : Delivered at the German Mathematical Society Seminar in Düsseldorf in June, 1986. Basel: Birkhäuser Basel Imprint Birkhäuser. ISBN978-3-0348-7690-2. OCLC851812426.
Jost, Jürgen (1991). Two-dimensional geometric variational problems. Chichester New York: Wiley. ISBN978-0-471-92839-3. OCLC21672946.
Albeverio, Sergio (1997). A mathematical introduction to string theory : variational problems, geometric and probabilistic methods. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-55610-1. OCLC836871453.
Jost, Jürgen (1998). Calculus of variations. Cambridge, UK New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-05712-7. OCLC39658898.
Jost, Jürgen (1997). Nonpositive curvature : geometric and analytic aspects. Basel Boston: Birkhäuser. ISBN978-3-7643-5736-8. OCLC36761646.