Yair Nathan Minsky (born in 1962) is an

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

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 ...

whose research concerns three-dimensional topology,

differential geometry Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multili ...

group theory In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as group (mathematics), groups. The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as ring (mathematics), rings, field ...

and

holomorphic dynamics Complex dynamics is the study of dynamical systems defined by iteration of functions on complex number spaces. Complex analytic dynamics is the study of the dynamics of specifically analytic functions. Techniques *General **Montel's theorem **Po ...

. He is a professor at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

. He is known for having proved Thurston's

ending lamination conjecture In hyperbolic geometry, the ending lamination theorem, originally conjectured by , states that hyperbolic 3-manifolds with finitely generated fundamental groups are determined by their topology together with certain "end invariants", which are geod ...

and as a student of curve complex geometry.

Biography

Minsky obtained his Ph.D. from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

in 1989 under the supervision of William Paul Thurston, with the thesis ''Harmonic Maps and Hyperbolic Geometry''. His Ph.D. students include

Jason Behrstock Jason Alan Behrstock is a mathematician at City University of New York known for his work in geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. Life and career Behrstock was born in California and was educated in California's public school sys ...

, Erica Klarreich, Hossein Namazi and Kasra Rafi.

Honors and awards

He received a

Sloan 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 1995. He was a speaker at the ICM (Madrid) 2006. He was named to the 2021 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to hyperbolic 3-manifolds, low-dimensional topology, geometric group theory and Teichmuller theory".

Selected invited talks

*Coxeter lectures (

Fields Institute The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, commonly known simply as the Fields Institute, is an international centre for scientific research in mathematical sciences. It is an independent non-profit with strong ties to 20 Ontari ...

) 2006 *Mallat Lectures (Technion) 2008

Selected publications

*with

Howard Masur Howard Alan Masur is an American mathematician who works on topology, geometry and combinatorial group theory. Biography Masur was an invited speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich. and is a fellow of the Amer ...

: "Geometry of the complex of curves I: Hyperbolicity", ''

Inventiones mathematicae ''Inventiones Mathematicae'' is a mathematical journal published monthly by Springer Science+Business Media. It was established in 1966 and is regarded as one of the most prestigious mathematics journals in the world. The current managing editors ...

'', 138 (1), 103–149. *with Howard Masur: "Geometry of the complex of curves II: Hierarchical structure", ''

Geometric and Functional Analysis ''Geometric and Functional Analysis'' (''GAFA'') is a mathematical journal published by Birkhäuser, an independent division of Springer-Verlag. The journal is published approximately bi-monthly. The journal publishes papers on broad range of top ...

'', 10 (4), 902–974. *"The classification of Kleinian surface groups, I: Models and bounds", ''

Annals of Mathematics The ''Annals of Mathematics'' is a mathematical journal published every two months by Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. History The journal was established as ''The Analyst'' in 1874 and with Joel E. Hendricks as the ...

'', 171 (2010), 1–107. *with Jeffrey Brock, and

Richard Canary Richard Douglas Canary (born in 1962) is an American mathematician working mainly on low-dimensional topology. He is a professor at the University of Michigan. Canary obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 under the supervision of Wi ...

: "The classification of Kleinian surface groups, II: The ending lamination conjecture", ''Annals of Mathematics'', 176 (2012), 1–149. *with

: "Dimension and rank for mapping class groups", ''Annals of Mathematics'' (2) 167 (2008), no. 3, 1055–1077. *"The classification of punctured-torus groups", ''Annals of Mathematics'', 149 (1999), 559–626. *"On rigidity, limit sets, and end invariants of hyperbolic 3-manifolds", ''

Journal of the American Mathematical Society The ''Journal of the American Mathematical Society'' (''JAMS''), is a quarterly peer-reviewed mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in January 1988. Abstracting and indexing This journal is abstr ...

'', 7 (3), 539–588.

Quotes

* "When Thurston proposed it, the

virtual Haken conjecture In topology, an area of mathematics, the virtually Haken conjecture states that every compact, orientable, irreducible three-dimensional manifold with infinite fundamental group is ''virtually Haken''. That is, it has a finite cover (a covering ...

seemed like a small question, but it hung on stubbornly, shining a spotlight on how little we knew about the field."

References

External links

Minsky's home page at Yale UniversityMinsky's profile at Google Scholar
{{DEFAULTSORT:Minsky, Yair 20th-century American mathematicians 1962 births Princeton University alumni Yale University faculty Sloan Research Fellows Topologists Geometers Living people University of Michigan faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 21st-century American mathematicians