Alan William Reid (born June 14, 1962) is a Scottish-American mathematician working primarily with arithmetic hyperbolic 3-manifolds. He is the

Edgar Odell Lovett Edgar Odell Lovett (April 14, 1871 – August 13, 1957) was an American educator and education administrator. He was the first president of Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas. Lovett was recommended to the post by Wo ...

Chair of mathematics at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranked among the top universit ...

, 2017—present.

Biography

Reid grew up in

Buckie Buckie ( gd, Bucaidh) is a burgh town (defined as such in 1888) on the Moray Firth coast of Scotland. Historically in Banffshire, Buckie was the largest town in the county until the administrative area was abolished in 1975. The town is the th ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to th ...

. He obtained his doctorate from the

University of Aberdeen , mottoeng = The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom , established = , type = Public research universityAncient university , endowment = £58.4 million (2021) , budget ...

, supervised by

Colin Maclachlan Colin may refer to: * Colin (given name) * Colin (surname) * ''Colin'' (film), a 2008 Cannes film festival zombie movie * Colin (horse) (1905–1932), thoroughbred racehorse * Colin (humpback whale), a humpback whale calf abandoned north of Sydney ...

, on the topic of ''Arithmetic Kleinian Groups and their Fuchsian Subgroups''. He was a

Royal Society University Research Fellow __NOTOC__ The Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) is a research fellowship awarded to outstanding early career scientists in the United Kingdom who are judged by the Royal Society to have the potential to become leaders in their fie ...

at Cambridge 1992-96.

Research

Alan Reid's research primarily focusses on

low-dimensional topology In mathematics, low-dimensional topology is the branch of topology that studies manifolds, or more generally topological spaces, of four or fewer dimensions. Representative topics are the structure theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot the ...

hyperbolic manifold In mathematics, a hyperbolic manifold is a space where every point looks locally like hyperbolic space of some dimension. They are especially studied in dimensions 2 and 3, where they are called hyperbolic surfaces and hyperbolic 3-manifolds, re ...

s and

profinite group In mathematics, a profinite group is a topological group that is in a certain sense assembled from a system of finite groups. The idea of using a profinite group is to provide a "uniform", or "synoptic", view of an entire system of finite groups ...

s. He proved that the

figure-eight knot The figure-eight knot or figure-of-eight knot is a type of stopper knot. It is very important in both sailing and rock climbing as a method of stopping ropes from running out of retaining devices. Like the overhand knot, which will jam under ...

is the only knot whose complement is an arithmetic hyperbolic 3-manifold. With Martin Bridson, Ben McReynolds and Ryan Spitler, he found the first examples of non-elementary

Kleinian group In mathematics, a Kleinian group is a discrete subgroup of the group of orientation-preserving isometries of hyperbolic 3-space . The latter, identifiable with , is the quotient group of the 2 by 2 complex matrices of determinant 1 by thei ...

s which are determined by their finite quotients among finitely generated residually finite groups.

Notable publications

* with Colin Maclachlan.

Awards and honours

* Speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians, Rio de Janeiro. * In 2013 he became one of the (inaugural)

Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows may refer to Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the ...

. * Pennzoil Company Regents Professor of Mathematics, University of Texas, Austin, 2011–2016. * Sir Edmund Whittaker Prize in 1993.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Reid, Alan William 20th-century Scottish mathematicians 21st-century Scottish mathematicians Topologists Rice University faculty Alumni of the University of Aberdeen Living people University of Texas at Austin faculty Scottish expatriates in the United States Fellows of the American Mathematical Society People from Buckie 1962 births