Jeffrey Renwick Weeks (born December 10, 1956) 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 geometric topologist and

cosmologist Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...

. Weeks is a 1999 MacArthur Fellow.

Biography

Weeks received his BA from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

in 1978, and his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 1985, under the supervision of

William Thurston William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. Thursto ...

. Since then he has taught at Stockton State College,

Ithaca College Ithaca College is a private college in Ithaca, New York. It was founded by William Egbert in 1892 as a conservatory of music and is set against the backdrop of the city of Ithaca (which is separate from the town), Cayuga Lake, waterfalls, and ...

, and

Middlebury College Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont. Founded in 1800 by Congregationalists, Middlebury was the first operating college or university in Vermont. The college currently enrolls 2,858 undergraduates from all 5 ...

, but has spent much of his time as a free-lance mathematician.

Research

Weeks' research contributions have mainly been in the field of

3-manifold In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a space that locally looks like Euclidean 3-dimensional space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane to a small enough observer, all 3-manifolds lo ...

s and

physical cosmology Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of f ...

. The Weeks manifold, discovered in 1985 by Weeks, is the

hyperbolic 3-manifold In mathematics, more precisely in topology and differential geometry, a hyperbolic 3–manifold is a manifold of dimension 3 equipped with a hyperbolic metric, that is a Riemannian metric which has all its sectional curvatures equal to -1. It ...

with the minimum possible volume. Weeks has written various computer programs to assist in mathematical research and

mathematical visualization Mathematical phenomena can be understood and explored via visualization. Classically this consisted of two-dimensional drawings or building three-dimensional models (particularly plaster models in the 19th and early 20th century), while today it ...

. His

SnapPea SnapPea is free software designed to help mathematicians, in particular low-dimensional topologists, study hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The primary developer is Jeffrey Weeks, who created the first version as part of his doctoral thesis, supervised ...

program is used to study

s, while he has also developed interactive software to introduce these ideas to middle-school, high-school, and college students. Weeks is particularly interested in using

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 ...

to understand the spatial universe. His book ''The Shape of Space: How to Visualize Surfaces and Three-dimensional Manifolds'' (Marcel Dekker, 1985, ) explores the geometry and topology of low-dimensional

manifold In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a n ...

s. The second edition (2002, ) explains some of his work in applying the material to cosmology.

Awards and honors

Weeks became a

MacArthur Fellow The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

in 1999. In 2007, he won the Levi L. Conant Prize for his expository paper, "The Poincaré Dodecahedral Space and the Mystery of the Missing Fluctuations" (''Notices of the AMS'' 2004),. and in 2008 he gave the first Levi Conant Lecture at Conant's former employer, the

Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is a Private university, private research university in Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1865 in Worcester, WPI was one of the United States' first engineering and technology universities and now has 14 ac ...

...

References

External links

*
Weeks' Topology and Geometry software website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weeks, Jeffrey Living people Topologists American cosmologists Dartmouth College alumni Princeton University alumni MacArthur Fellows 1956 births 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists