Selman Akbulut (born 1949) is a Turkish

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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

, specializing in research in

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 ho ...

, and

geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...

. He was a professor at

Michigan State University Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...

until February 2020.

Career

In 1975 he earned 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 a ...

from 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 ...

as a student of

Robion Kirby Robion Cromwell Kirby (born February 25, 1938) is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in low-dimensional topology. Together with Laurent C. Siebenmann he invented the Kirby–Siebenmann invariant ...

. In topology, he has worked on handlebody theory, 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 ...

symplectic topology 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 ...

, G2 manifolds. In the topology of real-algebraic sets, he and Henry C. King proved that every

compact Compact as used in politics may refer broadly to a pact or treaty; in more specific cases it may refer to: * Interstate compact * Blood compact, an ancient ritual of the Philippines * Compact government, a type of colonial rule utilized in British ...

piecewise-linear manifold is a real-algebraic set; they discovered new topological invariants of real-algebraic sets. He was a visiting scholar several times at 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 scholar ...

(in 1975-76, 1980–81, 2002, and 2005). On February 14, 2020, Akbulut was removed from his tenured position at MSU by the Board of Trustees, after complaints regarding his teaching attendance and communications with colleagues.

Contributions

He has developed 4-dimensional handlebody techniques, settling conjectures and solving problems about 4-manifolds, such as a conjecture of

Christopher Zeeman Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman FRS (4 February 1925 – 13 February 2016), was a British mathematician, known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory. Overview Zeeman's main contributions to mathematics were in topology, particu ...

, the Harer–Kas–Kirby conjecture, a problem of Martin Scharlemann, and problems of Sylvain Cappell and Julius Shaneson. He constructed an exotic compact 4-manifold (with boundary) from which he discovered " Akbulut corks".A. Scorpan, ''The wild world of 4-manifolds'' (p.90), AMS Pub. His most recent results concern the 4-dimensional smooth

Poincaré conjecture In the mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture (, , ) is a theorem about the characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space. Originally conjectured b ...

. He has supervised 14 Ph.D students as of 2019. He has more than 100 papers and three books published, and several books edited.

Notes

External links

*
Akbulut's homepageAkbulut's papers at ArXivAkbulut-King invariants
*

Real algebraic geometry In mathematics, real algebraic geometry is the sub-branch of algebraic geometry studying real algebraic sets, i.e. real-number solutions to algebraic equations with real-number coefficients, and mappings between them (in particular real polynom ...

* Akbulut cork {{DEFAULTSORT:Akbulut, Selman 20th-century Turkish mathematicians 21st-century Turkish mathematicians Academic scandals Topologists University of California, Berkeley alumni Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Living people 1949 births