Dennis Sullivan, mathematician who united chaos theory and geometric spaces, wins prestigious Abel P
By Brandon Specktor published about 3 hours ago
American mathematician Dennis Sullivan has been awarded the 2022 Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in math, for his contributions to the fields of topology and dynamical systems.
According to a statement from The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA), which distributes the award each year along with a prize that's equivalent to about $864,000 ($7.5 million Norwegian kroner), Sullivan has been recognized "for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects."
Topology is the study of properties of objects and spaces that do not change when they are deformed. The field is sometimes called "rubber-sheet geometry," because objects can be stretched into different shapes like rubber but cannot be broken, according to the University of Waterloo in Ontario. For example, a square can be deformed into a circle without breaking, but a doughnut shape cannot. Thus, a square is topologically equivalent to a circle, but a doughnut isn't.
Sullivan, now a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University in New York, was born in Port Huron, Michigan, on Feb. 12, 1941. He began studying topology as a graduate student at Princeton University in the early 1960s. His 1966 doctoral thesis, called "Triangulating Homotopy Equivalences," helped revolutionize the study of manifolds, spaces that look flat when viewed from any point on their surface but have a more complicated overall structure (like the surface of a sphere), according to the DNVA.
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