Michael Lounsbery Hutchings is an American

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 ...

, a professor of mathematics at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. He is known for proving the

double bubble conjecture In the mathematical theory of minimal surfaces, the double bubble theorem states that the shape that encloses and separates two given volumes and has the minimum possible surface area is a ''standard double bubble'': three spherical surfaces meet ...

on the shape of two-chambered soap bubbles, and for his work on circle-valued Morse theory and on

embedded contact homology In mathematics, Floer homology is a tool for studying symplectic geometry and low-dimensional topology. Floer homology is a novel invariant that arises as an infinite-dimensional analogue of finite-dimensional Morse homology. Andreas Floer i ...

, which he defined.

Career

As an undergraduate student at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, Hutchings did an

REU Reu or Ragau ( he, רְעוּ, Rə'ū; grc-x-biblical, Ῥαγαύ, Rhagaú), according to Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, was the son of Peleg and the father of Serug, thus being Abraham's great-great-grandfather and the ancestor of the Israelite ...

project with

Frank Morgan Francis Phillip Wuppermann (June 1, 1890 – September 18, 1949), known professionally as Frank Morgan, was an American character actor. He was best known for his appearances in films starting in the silent era in 1916, and then numerous sound ...

Williams College Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was kill ...

that began his interest in the mathematics of soap bubbles. He finished his undergraduate studies in 1993, and stayed at Harvard for graduate school, earning his Ph.D. in 1998 under the supervision of

Clifford Taubes Clifford Henry Taubes (born February 21, 1954) is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and works in gauge field theory, differential geometry, and low-dimensional topology. His brother is the journalist Gary Taube ...

. After postdoctoral and visiting positions at Stanford University, the

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics The Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik, MPIM) is a prestigious research institute located in Bonn, Germany. It is named in honor of the German physicist Max Planck and forms part of the Max Planck S ...

Bonn, Germany The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr ...

, and the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...

, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2001. His work on circle-valued Morse theory (partly in collaboration with Yi-Jen Lee) studies torsion invariants that arise from circle-valued Morse theory and, more generally, closed 1-forms, and relates them to the three-dimensional

Seiberg–Witten invariants In mathematics, and especially gauge theory, Seiberg–Witten invariants are invariants of compact smooth oriented 4-manifolds introduced by , using the Seiberg–Witten theory studied by during their investigations of Seiberg–Witten gauge theo ...

and the Meng–Taubes theorem, in analogy with Taubes'

Gromov Gromov (russian: Громов) is a Russian male surname, its feminine counterpart is Gromova (Громова). Gromov may refer to: * Alexander Georgiyevich Gromov (born 1947), Russian politician and KGB officer * Alexander Gromov (born 1959), R ...

–Seiberg–Witten theorem in four dimensions. The main body of his work involves

, or ECH. ECH is a holomorphic curve model for the Seiberg–Witten–Floer homology of a three-manifold, and is thus a version of Taubes's Gromov invariant for certain four-manifolds with boundary. Ideas connected to ECH were important in Taubes's proof of the Weinstein conjecture for three-manifolds. Embedded contact homology has now been proven to be isomorphic to both monopole Floer homology (Kutluhan–Lee–Taubes) and

Heegaard Floer homology In mathematics, Floer homology is a tool for studying symplectic geometry and low-dimensional topology. Floer homology is a novel invariant that arises as an infinite-dimensional analogue of finite-dimensional Morse homology. Andreas Floer in ...

(Colin–Ghiggini–Honda). Hutchings has also introduced a sequence of symplectic capacities known as ECH capacities, which have applications to embedding problems for Liouville domains. He won a

Sloan Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in 2003. He gave an

invited talk An invitation system is a method of encouraging people to join an organization, such as a Club (organization), club or a website. In regular society, it refers to any system whereby new members are chosen; they cannot simply apply. In relation to w ...

at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, entitled "Embedded contact homology and its applications". In 2012, he became a fellow of 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, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-01-21.

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hutchings, Michael Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Harvard College alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Topologists Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni