Name Peter Shalen Role Mathematician | ||
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Institutions University of Illinois at Chicago Education | ||
Volume and homology for hyperbolic 3 orbifolds arithmetic groups peter shalen
Peter B. Shalen (born c. 1946) is an American mathematician, working primarily in low-dimensional topology. He is the "S" in JSJ decomposition.
Contents
- Volume and homology for hyperbolic 3 orbifolds arithmetic groups peter shalen
- Homology and volume for hyperbolic 3 orbifolds and enumeration of arithmetic groups
- Life
- Work
- Selected publications
- References
Homology and volume for hyperbolic 3-orbifolds, and enumeration of arithmetic groups
Life
He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1962, and went on to earn a B.A. from Harvard College in 1966 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972. After posts at Columbia University, Rice University, and the Courant Institute, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Shalen was a Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in mathematics (1977—1979). He was elected as a member of the 2017 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to three-dimensional topology and for exposition".
Work
His work with Marc Culler related properties of representation varieties of hyperbolic 3-manifold groups to decompositions of 3-manifolds. Based on this work, Culler, Cameron Gordon, John Luecke, and Shalen proved the cyclic surgery theorem. An important corollary of the theorem is that at most one nontrivial Dehn surgery (+1 or −1) on a knot can result in a simply-connected 3-manifold. This was an important piece of the Gordon-Luecke theorem that knots are determined by their complements. This paper is often referred to as "CGLS".
With John W. Morgan, he generalized his work with Culler, and reproved several foundational results of William Thurston.