Lenhard L Ng | |
---|---|
Born | 1976 (age 47–48) |
Nationality | American [1] |
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Harvard University |
Known for | Differential Geometry Gauge Theory Legendrian Submanifolds |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Duke University Mathematical Sciences Research Institute |
Doctoral advisor | Tomasz Mrowka |
Lenhard Ng (born 1976) is an American mathematician, working primarily on symplectic geometry. Ng is a professor of mathematics at Duke University. [2]
Lenhard Ng is an American of Chinese descent. His father, Jack Ng, [3] is a professor of physics at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Lenhard earned his B.A. summa cum laude in Mathematics and Physics from Harvard University in three years and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.
He is married to Astrid Giugni.
Ng was a child prodigy [4] who was once thought to be the "smartest kid in America". At age 10, he earned a perfect score of 800 on the math portion of what is now called the SAT-I, a feat considered to be a “remarkable achievement” when a high school junior or senior did it. [5] He was the youngest person to have achieved this feat on his first try. [6] At the age of 11, he earned a perfect score on the College Board Test of Standard Written English. He earned a perfect score on the American High School Mathematics Examination in all 4 years of high school at Chapel Hill High School (Chapel Hill, North Carolina). He attended the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and was one of the gifted children included in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth longitudinal cohort. He was estimated to be 1 in approximately 30 million of his age-mates. [7]
At the age of 12, he began taking courses (on a part-time basis) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was not yet 13 when he won the Written Round of the MATHCOUNTS competition. At the age of 14, he participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad and earned a Silver medal. [8] He participated in this competition for the next two years and earned Gold medals. He entered college (Harvard University) full-time at the age of 16 and majored in Mathematics and Physics, graduating summa cum laude in three years. He competed in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition while at Harvard University and was a three-time fellow (in 1993, 1994, and 1995), one of only 18 people to have achieved this feat since 1938. The first time he became a Putnam Fellow was at the age of 16, making him one of only 6 people (the 5 others being Arthur Rubin, Noam Elkies, Don Zagier, David Ash and John Tillinghast) in the history of the competition to have achieved this feat. [9]
Ng works in contact and symplectic geometry. His Ph.D. thesis and several other papers concern Legendrian knots, and his best-known work applies symplectic field theory to derive invariants of (topological) knots. More precisely, the conormal bundle of a knot embedded in the three-sphere is a Legendrian torus inside the three-sphere's unit cosphere bundle (a contact five-manifold). Relative contact homology produces symplectic invariants of this pair, which give topological invariants of the knot. Ng computed the linearized contact homology in this case, providing an entirely combinatorial model for it which is a powerful knot invariant.
He was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to Floer homology and low-dimensional topology and service to the mathematical community". [10]
In mathematics, contact geometry is the study of a geometric structure on smooth manifolds given by a hyperplane distribution in the tangent bundle satisfying a condition called 'complete non-integrability'. Equivalently, such a distribution may be given as the kernel of a differential one-form, and the non-integrability condition translates into a maximal non-degeneracy condition on the form. These conditions are opposite to two equivalent conditions for 'complete integrability' of a hyperplane distribution, i.e. that it be tangent to a codimension one foliation on the manifold, whose equivalence is the content of the Frobenius theorem.
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Andreas Floer was a German mathematician who made seminal contributions to symplectic topology, and mathematical physics, in particular the invention of Floer homology. Floer's first pivotal contribution was a solution of a special case of Arnold's conjecture on fixed points of a symplectomorphism. Because of his work on Arnold's conjecture and his development of instanton homology, he achieved wide recognition and was invited as a plenary speaker for the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Kyoto in August 1990. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1989.
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.
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In mathematics, in the area of symplectic topology, relative contact homology is an invariant of spaces together with a chosen subspace. Namely, it is associated to a contact manifold and one of its Legendrian submanifolds. It is a part of a more general invariant known as symplectic field theory, and is defined using pseudoholomorphic curves.
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In mathematics, a Legendrian knot often refers to a smooth embedding of the circle into , which is tangent to the standard contact structure on . It is the lowest-dimensional case of a Legendrian submanifold, which is an embedding of a k-dimensional manifold into a (2k+1)-dimensional contact manifold that is always tangent to the contact hyperplane.
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