edgepedia

Low-dimensional and knot theorists

28 articles

Andrew Casson

Andrew Casson was a British low-dimensional topologist, professor at Cambridge, Texas, Berkeley, and Yale, known for Casson handles and the Casson invariant of homology 3-spheres.

Andrew H. Wallace

Andrew H. Wallace (Andrew Hugh Wallace) was a Scottish-born American mathematician who worked in algebraic and differential topology, notably solving the high-dimensional Poincaré problem using spherical modifications.

Cameron Gordon (mathematician)

Cameron Gordon is a Scottish-born American mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin, known for the Gordon–Luecke theorem and the Cyclic Surgery Theorem in knot theory.

Christopher Zeeman

Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman (1925–2016) was a British topologist who built the Mathematics Institute at Warwick and was the first mathematician to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, in 1978.

Christos Papakyriakopoulos

Christos Dimitriou Papakyriakopoulos was a Greek mathematician at Princeton who proved Dehn's lemma, the loop theorem, and the sphere theorem in 1957, winning the first Veblen Prize in 1964.

Danilo Blanuša

Danilo Blanuša (1903–1987) was a Croatian mathematician and physicist who discovered the Blanuša snarks in 1946 and derived 1947 formulae for heat and temperature in special relativity.

G. Robert Meyerhoff

G. Robert Meyerhoff is a mathematician at Boston College who earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1981 under William Thurston and studies hyperbolic 3-manifolds and their volumes.

Gheorghe Călugăreanu

Gheorghe Călugăreanu (1902–1976) was a Romanian mathematician at the University of Cluj who introduced the Călugăreanu invariant in knot theory and, with Dimitrie Pompeiu, co-founded generalized analytic functions.

Hellmuth Kneser

Hellmuth Kneser (1898–1973) was a German mathematician best known for proving the prime decomposition of 3-manifolds in 1929 and constructing a half-iterate of the exponential function in 1950.

Herbert Seifert

Herbert Seifert, born Karl Johannes Herbert Seifert, was a German mathematician (1907–1996) at Heidelberg known for Seifert surfaces, Seifert fibered spaces, and the Seifert–van Kampen theorem.

Hilmar Wendt

Hilmar Wendt (1913–2002) was a German mathematician who co-named the Hantzsche–Wendt manifold and held a chair of practical mathematics at the University of Bonn from 1948 to 1981.

István Fáry

István Fáry (1922–1984) was a Hungarian mathematician and UC Berkeley professor of geometry and topology, known for Fáry's theorem on straight-line drawings of planar graphs and the Fáry–Milnor theorem on knots.

John Edwin Luecke

John Edwin Luecke is a mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin known for the cyclic surgery theorem and the Gordon–Luecke theorem in knot theory.

John William Theodore Youngs

John William Theodore Youngs, known as J. W. T. Youngs, was an American mathematician who co-solved the Heawood map-coloring conjecture with Gerhard Ringel in 1968.

Kenneth Millett

Kenneth Millett is an American mathematician and emeritus professor at UC Santa Barbara, co-discoverer of the 1985 HOMFLY knot polynomial and developer of the average crossing number.

Kurt Reidemeister

Kurt Reidemeister (1893–1971) was a German mathematician who proved the Reidemeister moves characterizing equivalent link diagrams, wrote the 1932 standard work Knotentheorie, and defined Reidemeister torsion in 1935.

Louis Antoine

Louis Antoine (Louis Auguste Antoine) was a French mathematician blinded in World War I whose 1921 thesis founded the study of wild embeddings and Antoine's necklace.

Louis Kauffman

Louis H. Kauffman, born 1945 in Potsdam, New York, is an American mathematician at the University of Illinois Chicago known for the Kauffman bracket polynomial and knot theory.

Mikhail Khovanov

Mikhail Khovanov is a mathematician, formerly at Columbia and now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who created Khovanov homology, a link invariant that categorifies the Jones polynomial and detects the unknot.

Morwen Thistlethwaite

Morwen Thistlethwaite is a mathematician and professor at the University of Tennessee known for computer tabulation of knots, work on the Jones polynomial, and the Tait conjectures.

Peter B. Kronheimer

Peter B. Kronheimer is a mathematician at Harvard working on gauge theory and low-dimensional topology, known for proving Property P and the Milnor conjecture on torus knots.

Poul Heegaard

Poul Heegaard (1871–1948) was a Danish mathematician whose 1898 Copenhagen thesis introduced the Heegaard splitting of 3-manifolds and whose counterexample to Poincaré duality reshaped algebraic topology.

Ralph Fox

Ralph Hartzler Fox (1913–1973) was an American topologist at Princeton University who led a leading knot theory group and created the Fox calculus and n-coloring test.

Selman Akbulut

Selman Akbulut, born 1949, is a Turkish mathematician at Michigan State University known for the Akbulut cork and for proving proposed exotic smooth 4-spheres standard.

Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin

Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin (Владимир Абрамович Рохлин, 1919–1984) was a Soviet mathematician who made foundational contributions to topology and ergodic theory, including the signature theorem and the Rokhlin invariant, and taught Gromov and Eliashberg in Leningrad.

W. B. R. Lickorish

W. B. R. Lickorish, known as Raymond, is a British knot theorist at the University of Cambridge, known for the Lickorish–Wallace theorem, the HOMFLY polynomial, and his 1997 graduate text An Introduction to Knot Theory.

Walter Hantzsche

Walter Hantzsche (1912–1944) was a German mathematician and topologist known for the Hantzsche–Wendt manifolds, named for his 1935 paper with Hilmar Wendt; he earned his doctorate at Halle in 1937 and died at 31.

Zoltán Szabó (mathematician)

Zoltán Szabó, born in Budapest in 1965, is a Hungarian mathematician at Princeton University who works in low-dimensional topology and, with Peter Ozsváth, created Heegaard Floer homology.