Ciprian Manolescu (; born December 24, 1978) is a

Romanian-American Romanian Americans () are Americans who have Romanian ancestry. According to the 2023 American Community Survey, 425,738 Americans indicated Romanian as their first or second ancestry, however other sources provide higher estimates, which a ...

mathematician, working in

gauge theory In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian, and hence the dynamics of the system itself, does not change under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie groups). Formally, t ...

symplectic geometry Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. Symplectic geometry has its origins in the ...

, and

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 theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot theory, ...

. He is currently a professor of mathematics at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

Biography

Manolescu completed his first eight classes at School no. 11 Mihai Eminescu and his secondary education at Ion Brătianu High School in

Pitești Pitești () is a city in Romania, located on the river Argeș (river), Argeș. The capital and largest city of Argeș County, it is an important commercial and industrial center, as well as the home of two universities. Pitești is situated in th ...

. He completed his undergraduate studies and PhD at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

under the direction of Peter B. Kronheimer. He was the winner of the

Morgan Prize The Morgan Prize (full name Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student) is an annual award given to an undergraduate student in the US, Canada, or Mexico who demonstrates superior mathematic ...

, awarded jointly by AMS-MAA-SIAM, in 2002. His undergraduate thesis was on ''Finite dimensional approximation in Seiberg–Witten theory'', and his PhD thesis topic was ''A spectrum valued TQFT from the Seiberg–Witten equations''. In early 2013, he released a paper detailing a disproof of the

triangulation In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by forming triangles to the point from known points. Applications In surveying Specifically in surveying, triangulation involves only angle m ...

conjecture for

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 of dimension 5 and higher. For this paper, he received the E. H. Moore Prize from 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, ...

Awards and honors

He was among the recipients of the Clay Research Fellowship (2004–2008). In 2012, he was awarded one of the ten prizes of the

European Mathematical Society The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The curren ...

for his work on

, and particularly for his role in the development of combinatorial Heegaard Floer homology. He was elected as a member of the 2017 class of

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

s of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to Floer homology and the topology of manifolds". In 2018, he was an invited speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

(ICM) in

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of Rio de Janeiro. It is the List of cities in Brazil by population, second-most-populous city in Brazil (after São Paulo) and the Largest cities in the America ...

. In 2020, he received a Simons Investigator Award. The citation reads: "Ciprian Manolescu works in low-dimensional topology and gauge theory. His research is centered on constructing new versions of Floer homology and applying them to questions in topology. With collaborators, he showed that many Floer-theoretic invariants are algorithmically computable. He also developed a new variant of Seiberg-Witten Floer homology, which he used to prove the existence of non-triangulable manifolds in high dimensions."

Competitions

He has one of the best records ever in mathematical competitions: * He holds the sole distinction of writing three perfect papers at the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. It is widely regarded as the most prestigious mathematical competition in the wor ...

: Toronto, Canada (1995); Bombay, India (1996); Mar del Plata, Argentina (1997). * Manolescu is a three-time Putnam Fellow, having placed in the top five in the

William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual list of mathematics competitions, mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in th ...

in 1997, 1998, and 2000.

Selected works

* * *

References

External links

Manolescu's Stanford Page

The Clay Mathematics Institute page
* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Manolescu, Ciprian 21st-century Romanian mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Topologists Harvard University alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty People from Alexandria, Romania 1978 births Living people Romanian emigrants to the United States International Mathematical Olympiad participants Geometers Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Putnam Fellows