Nathan Dunfield

{{short description|American mathematician}}

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Nathan Dunfield

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| birth_date = {{birth-date and age|1975}}

| birth_place = Ann Arbor, Michigan

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| citizenship = USA

| nationality = American

| fields = geometric group theory
low-dimensional topology

| workplaces = Harvard University
Caltech
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

| alma_mater = Oregon State University
University of Chicago

| doctoral_advisors = Peter Shalen
Melvin Rothenberg

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| known_for = SnapPy

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| awards = Fellow of the American Mathematical Society

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Nathan Michael Dunfield (born 1975) is an American mathematician, specializing in Topology.

Career

Dunfield did his undergraduate studies at Oregon State University, obtaining a B.S. in mathematics in 1994. For his graduate studies, he went to the University of Chicago, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1999, with a thesis on Cyclic Surgery, Degrees of Maps of Character Curves, and Volume Rigidity for Hyperbolic Manifolds written under the supervision of Peter Shalen and Melvin Rothenberg.{{cite web|url=https://faculty.math.illinois.edu/~nmd/CV/dunfield-CV.pdf|title=Nathan M. Dunfield CV|access-date=April 2, 2020}}{{MathGenealogy|id=38330}}

He then was a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor at Harvard University (1999–2003) and an associate professor at the California Institute of Technology (2003–2007), after which he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was promoted to professor in 2018.

Work

Dunfield is an expert in group theory, low-dimensional topology, three-manifolds, and computational aspects of these fields. He is also, with Marc Culler, one of the key developers of the program SnapPy,

[https://www.math.uic.edu/t3m/SnapPy/ SnapPy] the modern version of Jeffrey Weeks' program SnapPea.

Dunfield is an editor for the New York Journal of Mathematics.[http://nyjm.albany.edu/edboard.htm New York Journal of Mathematics]

Selected publications

References

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