Marc Lackenby | |
|---|---|
 Lackenby in 1997 | |
| Title | Professor of Mathematics |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Thesis | Dehn Surgery and Unknotting Operations (1997) |
| Doctoral advisor | W. B. R. Lickorish |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Mathematics |
| Sub-discipline | Topology |
| Institutions | University of Oxford |
| Website | people |
Marc Lackenby is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford whose research concerns knot theory,low-dimensional topology,and group theory.
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Lackenby studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge beginning in 1990,and earned his Ph.D. in 1997,with a dissertation on Dehn Surgery and Unknotting Operations supervised by W. B. R. Lickorish. [1] After positions as Miller Research Fellow at the University of California,Berkeley and as Research Fellow at Cambridge,he joined Oxford as a Lecturer and Fellow of St Catherine's in 1999. He was promoted to Professor at Oxford in 2006. [2]
Lackenby's research contributions include a proof of a strengthened version of the 2π theorem on sufficient conditions for Dehn surgery to produce a hyperbolic manifold, [L00] a bound on the hyperbolic volume of a knot complement of an alternating knot, [L04] and a proof that every diagram of the unknot can be transformed into a diagram without crossings by only a polynomial number of Reidemeister moves. [L15] In February 2021 he announced a new unknot recognition algorithm that runs in quasi-polynomial time. [3]
Lackenby won the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2003. [4] In 2006,he won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in mathematics and statistics. [5] He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010. [6]
