Robert Mark Goresky is a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

who invented

intersection homology In topology, a branch of mathematics, intersection homology is an analogue of singular homology especially well-suited for the study of singular spaces, discovered by Mark Goresky and Robert MacPherson in the fall of 1974 and developed by them ov ...

with his advisor and life partner Robert MacPherson.

Career

Goresky received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from Brown University in 1976. His thesis, titled ''Geometric Cohomology and Homology of Stratified Objects'', was written under the direction of MacPherson. Many of the results in his thesis were published in 1981 by the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. He has taught at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

in Vancouver, and Northeastern University.

Awards

Goresky received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1981. He received the Coxeter–James Prize in 1984. In 2002, Goresky and MacPherson were jointly awarded the

Leroy P. Steele Prize The Leroy P. Steele Prizes are awarded every year by the American Mathematical Society, for distinguished research work and writing in the field of mathematics. Since 1993, there has been a formal division into three categories. The prizes have b ...

for Seminal Contribution to Research by the

. In 2012 Goresky became a fellow of the

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-01-19.

Personal

Goresky's PhD advisor, Robert D. MacPherson, later became his life partner. Their discovery of intersection homology made "both of them famous." After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were instrumental in channeling aid to Russian mathematicians, especially many who had to hide their sexuality.

Selected publications

* Goresky, Mark; MacPherson, Robert, ''La dualité de Poincaré pour les espaces singuliers'', C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Sér. A-B 284 (1977), no. 24, A1549–A1551. * Goresky, Mark; MacPherson, Robert, ''Intersection homology theory'',

Topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing ...

19 (1980), no. 2, 135–162. * Goresky, Mark, ''Whitney stratified chains and cochains'', Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 267 (1981), 175–196. * Goresky, Mark; MacPherson, Robert, ''Intersection homology. II'', Inventiones Mathematicae 72 (1983), no. 1, 77–129. * Goresky, Mark; MacPherson, Robert, ''Stratified Morse Theory, Springer Verlag, N. Y. (1989), Ergebnisse vol. 14.

References

External links

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* 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Canadian mathematicians Topologists Brown University alumni Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Living people 1950 births Northeastern University faculty University of British Columbia faculty Canadian expatriate academics in the United States {{US-mathematician-stub