John Morgan | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Rice University |
Awards | Sloan Research Fellow (1974) Gauss Lectureship (2008) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Stony Brook University Columbia University |
Doctoral advisor | Morton L. Curtis |
Doctoral students | Sadayoshi Kojima Peter Ozsváth Zoltán Szabó |
John Willard Morgan (born March 21, 1946) is an American mathematician known for his contributions to topology and geometry. He is a Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and a member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University.
Morgan received his B.A. in 1968 and Ph.D. in 1969, both from Rice University. [1] [2] [3] His Ph.D. thesis, entitled Stable tangential homotopy equivalences, was written under the supervision of Morton L. Curtis. [1] [2] He was an instructor at Princeton University from 1969 to 1972, and an assistant professor at MIT from 1972 to 1974. [1] [3] [4] He has been on the faculty at Columbia University since 1974, serving as the Chair of the Department of Mathematics from 1989 to 1991 and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2010. [1] [3] [4] Morgan is a member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University and served as its founding director from 2009 to 2016. [3] [4]
From 1974 to 1976, Morgan was a Sloan Research Fellow. [1] In 2008, he was awarded a Gauss Lectureship by the German Mathematical Society. In 2009 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [4] In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [5] Morgan is a Member of the European Academy of Sciences. [1]
Morgan's best-known work deals with the topology of complex manifolds and algebraic varieties. In the 1970s, Dennis Sullivan developed the notion of a minimal model of a differential graded algebra. [6] One of the simplest examples of a differential graded algebra is the space of smooth differential forms on a smooth manifold, so that Sullivan was able to apply his theory to understand the topology of smooth manifolds. In the setting of Kähler geometry, due to the corresponding version of the Poincaré lemma, this differential graded algebra has a decomposition into holomorphic and anti-holomorphic parts. In collaboration with Pierre Deligne, Phillip Griffiths, and Sullivan, Morgan used this decomposition to apply Sullivan's theory to study the topology of compact Kähler manifolds. Their primary result is that the real homotopy type of such a space is determined by its cohomology ring. Morgan later extended this analysis to the setting of smooth complex algebraic varieties, using Deligne's formulation of mixed Hodge structures to extend the Kähler decomposition of smooth differential forms and of the exterior derivative. [7]
In 2002 and 2003, Grigori Perelman posted three papers to the arXiv which purported to use Richard Hamilton's theory of Ricci flow solve the geometrization conjecture in three-dimensional topology, of which the renowned Poincaré conjecture is a special case. [8] Perelman's first two papers claimed to prove the geometrization conjecture; the third paper gives an argument which would obviate the technical work in the second half of the second paper in order to give a shortcut to prove the Poincaré conjecture.
Starting in 2003, and culminating in a 2008 publication, Bruce Kleiner and John Lott posted detailed annotations of Perelman's first two papers to their websites, covering his work on the proof of the geometrization conjecture. [9] In 2006, Huai-Dong Cao and Xi-Ping Zhu published an exposition of Hamilton and Perelman's works, also covering Perelman's first two articles. [10] In 2007, Morgan and Gang Tian published a book on Perelman's first paper, the first half of his second paper, and his third paper. As such, they covered the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. In 2014, they published a book covering the remaining details for the geometrization conjecture. In 2006, Morgan gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, saying that Perelman's work had "now been thoroughly checked. He has proved the Poincaré conjecture." [11]
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In mathematics, differential topology is the field dealing with the topological properties and smooth properties of smooth manifolds. In this sense differential topology is distinct from the closely related field of differential geometry, which concerns the geometric properties of smooth manifolds, including notions of size, distance, and rigid shape. By comparison differential topology is concerned with coarser properties, such as the number of holes in a manifold, its homotopy type, or the structure of its diffeomorphism group. Because many of these coarser properties may be captured algebraically, differential topology has strong links to algebraic topology.
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space.
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.
In mathematics, Thurston's geometrization conjecture states that each of certain three-dimensional topological spaces has a unique geometric structure that can be associated with it. It is an analogue of the uniformization theorem for two-dimensional surfaces, which states that every simply connected Riemann surface can be given one of three geometries . In three dimensions, it is not always possible to assign a single geometry to a whole topological space. Instead, the geometrization conjecture states that every closed 3-manifold can be decomposed in a canonical way into pieces that each have one of eight types of geometric structure. The conjecture was proposed by William Thurston, and implies several other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's elliptization conjecture.
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. In 2005, Perelman resigned from his research post in Steklov Institute of Mathematics and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, owing to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. He lives in seclusion in Saint Petersburg and has declined requests for interviews since 2006.
In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow, sometimes also referred to as Hamilton's Ricci flow, is a certain partial differential equation for a Riemannian metric. It is often said to be analogous to the diffusion of heat and the heat equation, due to formal similarities in the mathematical structure of the equation. However, it is nonlinear and exhibits many phenomena not present in the study of the heat equation.
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.
Pierre René, Viscount Deligne is a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for work on the Weil conjectures, leading to a complete proof in 1973. He is the winner of the 2013 Abel Prize, 2008 Wolf Prize, 1988 Crafoord Prize, and 1978 Fields Medal.
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Phillip Augustus Griffiths IV is an American mathematician, known for his work in the field of geometry, and in particular for the complex manifold approach to algebraic geometry. He is a major developer in particular of the theory of variation of Hodge structure in Hodge theory and moduli theory, which forms part of transcendental algebraic geometry and which also touches upon major and distant areas of differential geometry. He also worked on partial differential equations, coauthored with Shiing-Shen Chern, Robert Bryant and Robert Gardner on Exterior Differential Systems.
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Bruce Alan Kleiner is an American mathematician, working in differential geometry and topology and geometric group theory.
Huai-Dong Cao is a Chinese–American mathematician. He is the A. Everett Pitcher Professor of Mathematics at Lehigh University. He is known for his research contributions to the Ricci flow, a topic in the field of geometric analysis.
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John William Lott is a professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for contributions to differential geometry.
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