Ian Agol | |
---|---|
Born | Los Angeles, California, U.S. | May 13, 1970
Alma mater | California Institute of Technology University of California, San Diego |
Known for | Virtually Haken conjecture Freedman–He–Wang conjecture Wise's conjecture Marden tameness conjecture |
Awards | Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2016) [1] Veblen Prize in Geometry (2013) Senior Berwick Prize (2012) Clay Research Award (2009) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Doctoral advisor | Michael Freedman |
Ian Agol[ needs IPA ] (born May 13, 1970) is an American mathematician who deals primarily with the topology of three-dimensional manifolds. [2]
Agol graduated with B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1992 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of California, San Diego. At UCSD, his advisor was Michael Freedman and his thesis was Topology of Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds. [3] He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley [4] and a former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [5]
In 2004, Agol proved the Marden tameness conjecture, a conjecture of Albert Marden. [6] It states that a hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely generated fundamental group is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact 3-manifold. The conjecture was also independently proven by Danny Calegari and David Gabai, and implies the Ahlfors measure conjecture. [6]
In 2012, he announced a proof of the virtually Haken conjecture, which was published a year later. [7] The conjecture (now theorem) states that every aspherical 3-manifold is finitely covered by a Haken manifold.
In 2022, he posted on the ArXiv a proof of Cameron Gordon's 1981 conjecture on knot theory saying that ribbon concordance forms a partial ordering on the set of knots. [8] [9]
Agol, Calegari, and Gabai received the 2009 Clay Research Award for their proof of the Marden tameness conjecture. [6]
In 2005, Agol was a Guggenheim Fellow. [10] In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [11]
In 2013, Agol was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, along with Daniel Wise. [12]
In 2015, he was awarded the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, "for spectacular contributions to low dimensional topology and geometric group theory, including work on the solutions of the tameness, virtually Haken and virtual fibering conjectures." [13]
In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [14]
His identical twin brother, Eric Agol, [15] [16] [17] is an astronomy professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. [18]
William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
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In mathematics, more precisely in topology and differential geometry, a hyperbolic 3-manifold is a manifold of dimension 3 equipped with a hyperbolic metric, that is a Riemannian metric which has all its sectional curvatures equal to −1. It is generally required that this metric be also complete: in this case the manifold can be realised as a quotient of the 3-dimensional hyperbolic space by a discrete group of isometries.
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In mathematics, the tameness theorem states that every complete hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely generated fundamental group is topologically tame, in other words homeomorphic to the interior of a compact 3-manifold.
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In the mathematical field of knot theory, the hyperbolic volume of a hyperbolic link is the volume of the link's complement with respect to its complete hyperbolic metric. The volume is necessarily a finite real number, and is a topological invariant of the link. As a link invariant, it was first studied by William Thurston in connection with his geometrization conjecture.
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Tomasz Mrowka is an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry and gauge theory. He is the Singer Professor of Mathematics and former head of the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Daniel T. Wise is an American mathematician who specializes in geometric group theory and 3-manifolds. He is a professor of mathematics at McGill University.
Albert Marden is an American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis and hyperbolic geometry.