Sir Andrew John Wiles is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
In mathematics, low-dimensional topology is the branch of topology that studies manifolds, or more generally topological spaces, of four or fewer dimensions. Representative topics are the structure theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot theory, and braid groups. This can be regarded as a part of geometric topology. It may also be used to refer to the study of topological spaces of dimension 1, though this is more typically considered part of continuum theory.
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, a Heegaard splitting is a decomposition of a compact oriented 3-manifold that results from dividing it into two handlebodies.
In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a topological space that locally looks like a three-dimensional Euclidean space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane to a small and close enough observer, all 3-manifolds look like our universe does to a small enough observer. This is made more precise in the definition below.
In mathematics, Floer homology is a tool for studying symplectic geometry and low-dimensional topology. Floer homology is a novel invariant that arises as an infinite-dimensional analogue of finite-dimensional Morse homology. Andreas Floer introduced the first version of Floer homology, now called symplectic Floer homology, in his proof of the Arnold conjecture in symplectic geometry. Floer also developed a closely related theory for Lagrangian submanifolds of a symplectic manifold. A third construction, also due to Floer, associates homology groups to closed three-dimensional manifolds using the Yang–Mills functional. These constructions and their descendants play a fundamental role in current investigations into the topology of symplectic and contact manifolds as well as (smooth) three- and four-dimensional manifolds.
Peter B. Shalen is an American mathematician, working primarily in low-dimensional topology. He is the "S" in JSJ decomposition.
Jeff Cheeger is a mathematician. Cheeger is professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in New York City. His main interests are differential geometry and its connections with topology and analysis.
Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.
In mathematics, the Gordon–Luecke theorem on knot complements states that if the complements of two tame knots are homeomorphic, then the knots are equivalent. In particular, any homeomorphism between knot complements must take a meridian to a meridian.
Friedhelm Waldhausen is a German mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology. He made fundamental contributions in the fields of 3-manifolds and (algebraic) K-theory.
Richard Vincent Kadison was an American mathematician known for his contributions to the study of operator algebras.
Marc Edward Culler is an American mathematician who works in geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. A native Californian, Culler did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Santa Barbara and his graduate work at Berkeley where he graduated in 1978. He is now at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Culler is the son of Glen Jacob Culler who was an important early innovator in the development of the Internet.
John Edwin Luecke is an American mathematician who works in topology and knot theory. He got his Ph.D. in 1985 from the University of Texas at Austin and is now a professor in the department of mathematics at that institution.
Ian Agol is an American mathematician who deals primarily with the topology of three-dimensional manifolds.
Michael Lounsbery Hutchings is an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for proving the double bubble conjecture on the shape of two-chambered soap bubbles, and for his work on circle-valued Morse theory and on embedded contact homology, which he defined.
Martin George Scharlemann is an American topologist who is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Robion Kirby in 1974.
Wu-Chung Hsiang is a Taiwanese-American mathematician, specializing in topology. Hsiang served as chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University from 1982 to 1985 and was one of the most influential topologists of the second half of the 20th century.
Introduction to 3-Manifolds is a mathematics book on low-dimensional topology. It was written by Jennifer Schultens and published by the American Mathematical Society in 2014 as volume 151 of their book series Graduate Studies in Mathematics.
