Tomasz Mrowka
| Tomasz Mrowka | |
|---|---|
|
Mrowka in Aarhus, 2011. | |
| Born |
September 8, 1961 (age 55) State College, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | MIT |
| Alma mater | University of California |
| Doctoral advisor |
Clifford Taubes Robion Kirby |
| Doctoral students |
Larry Guth Christopher Herald Maksim Lipyansky Lenhard Ng Yongbin Ruan Aleksey Zinger |
| Notable awards |
Veblen Prize (2007) Doob Prize (2011) |
Tomasz Mrowka (born September 8, 1961) is an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry and gauge theory. He is the Singer Professor of Mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mrowka is married to MIT mathematics professor Gigliola Staffilani.[1]
Career
A 1983 graduate of MIT, he received the PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 1988 under the direction of Clifford Taubes and Robion Kirby. He joined the MIT mathematics faculty as professor in 1996, following faculty appointments at Stanford and at Caltech (professor 1994–96).[2] At MIT, he was the Simons Professor of Mathematics from 2007-2010, and was named the Simons Professor of Mathematics in 2010. He was named head of the Department of Mathematics in 2014.[3]
A prior Sloan fellow and Young Presidential Investigator, he was selected for a Clay Mathematics Visiting Professorship in 1995. In 2007, he received the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry from the AMS jointly with Peter Kronheimer, "for their joint contributions to both three- and four-dimensional topology through the development of deep analytical techniques and applications."[4] He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010, and in 2011 received the Doob Prize with Peter B. Kronheimer for their book Monopoles and Three-Manifolds (Cambridge University Press, 2007).[5] He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Research
Mrowka’s work combines analysis, geometry, and topology, specializing in the use of partial differential equations, such as the Yang-Mills equations from particle physics to analyze low-dimensional mathematical objects.[3] Jointly with Robert Gompf, he discovered four-dimensional models of space-time topology.[6]
In joint work with Peter Kronheimer, Mrowka settled many long-standing conjectures, three of which earned them the 2007 Veblen Prize. The award citation mentions three papers that Mrowka and Kronheimer wrote together. The first paper in 1995 deals with Donaldson's polynomial invariants and introduced Kronheimer–Mrowka basic class, which have been used to prove a variety of results about the topology and geometry of 4-manifolds, and partly motivated Witten's introduction of the Seiberg–Witten invariants.[7] The second paper proves the so-called Thom conjecture and was one of the first deep applications of the then brand new Seiberg–Witten equations to four-dimensional topology.[8] In the third paper in 2004, Mrowka and Kronheimer used their earlier development of Seiberg–Witten monopole Floer homology to prove the Property P conjecture for knots.[9] The citation says: "The proof is a beautiful work of synthesis which draws upon advances made in the fields of gauge theory, symplectic and contact geometry, and foliations over the past 20 years."[4]
In further recent work with Kronheimer, Mrowka showed that a certain subtle combinatorially-defined knot invariant introduced by Mikhail Khovanov can detect “knottedness.”[10]
References
- ↑ Baker, Billy (April 28, 2008), "A life of unexpected twists takes her from farm to math department", Boston Globe. Archived by the Indian Academy of Sciences, Women in Science initiative.
- ↑ "Tomasz Mrowka | MIT Mathematics". math.mit.edu. Retrieved 2015-09-18.
- 1 2 "Tomasz Mrowka named head of the Department of Mathematics". Retrieved 2015-09-18.
- 1 2 "2007 Veblen Prize" (PDF). American Mathematical Society. April 2007.
- ↑ Kronheimer and Mrowka Receive 2011 Doob Prize
- ↑ Gompf, Robert E.; Mrowka, Tomasz S. (1993-07-01). "Irreducible 4-Manifolds Need not be Complex". Annals of Mathematics. Second Series. 138 (1): 61–111. doi:10.2307/2946635. JSTOR 2946635.
- ↑ Kronheimer, Peter; Mrowka, Tomasz (1995). "Embedded surfaces and the structure of Donaldson's polynomial invariants" (PDF). J. Differential Geom. 41 (3): 573–34.
- ↑ Kronheimer, P. B.; Mrowka, T. S. (1994-01-01). "The Genus of Embedded Surfaces in the Projective Plane". Mathematical Research Letters. 1 (6). doi:10.4310/mrl.1994.v1.n6.a14.
- ↑ Kronheimer, Peter B; Mrowka, Tomasz S (2004-01-01). "Witten's conjecture and Property P". Geometry & Topology. 8 (1). doi:10.2140/gt.2004.8.295.
- ↑ Kronheimer, P. B.; Mrowka, T. S. (2011-02-11). "Khovanov homology is an unknot-detector". Publications mathématiques de l'IHÉS. 113 (1): 97–208. doi:10.1007/s10240-010-0030-y. ISSN 0073-8301.