Nationality Canadian Education Princeton University Name Igor Rivin | Known for Inscribable polyhedra | |
Institutions University of St. Andrews
Temple University
Caltech
University of Warwick
Institute for Advanced Study
Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques Alma mater Princeton University
University of Toronto Doctoral students Jean-Christophe Curtillet
Michael Dobbins Fields Mathematics, Computer Science, Materials Science | ||
Notable awards Whitehead Prize (1998) Doctoral advisor William Thurston | ||
The unreasonable effectiveness of hyperbolic geometry igor rivin
Igor Rivin (born 1961 in Moscow, USSR) is a Russian-Canadian mathematician, working in various fields of pure and applied mathematics, computer science, and materials science. He is the Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews and the Chief Quantitative Strategist at Accern.
Contents
- The unreasonable effectiveness of hyperbolic geometry igor rivin
- some generic properties of some infinite groups igor rivin
- Career
- Major accomplishments
- Honors
- References
some generic properties of some infinite groups igor rivin
Career
He received his B.Sc (Hon) in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1981, and his Ph.D in 1986 from Princeton University under the direction of William Thurston. Following his doctorate, Rivin directed development of QLISP and the Mathematica kernel, before returning to academia in 1992, where he held positions at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Melbourne, Warwick, and Caltech. Since 1999, Rivin has been professor of mathematics at Temple University. In 2015, he was appointed Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews.
Major accomplishments
Rivin's PhD thesis and a series of extensions characterized hyperbolic 3-dimensional polyhedra in terms of their dihedral angles, resolving a long-standing open question of Jakob Steiner on the inscribable combinatorial types. These, and some related results in convex geometry, have been used in 3-manifold topology, theoretical physics, computational geometry, and the recently developed field of discrete differential geometry.
Rivin has also made advances in counting geodesics on surfaces, the study of generic elements of discrete subgroups of Lie groups, and in the theory of dynamical systems.
Rivin is also active in applied areas, having written large parts of the Mathematica 2.0 kernel, and he developed a database of hypothetical zeolites in collaboration with M. M. J. Treacy.
Rivin is a frequent contributor to MathOverflow.