Director of the Center
(This page -- as well as Rob's curriculum vitae (CV) -- is like a cathedral: always under reconstruction ;-)
Useful links
Here are useful links to GMail the LANL Geometry Preprint arXiv and to the American Mathematical Society's MathSciNet .
This summer (during June-July 2008) Rob is running a workshop on the Geometry of Condensed Matter at the Aspen Center for Physics, where he also spent part of the summer of 2004. Rob is on sabbatical at the University of Pennsylvania during Spring 2008.
Here's a link to Rob's Class Syllabi, Notes, etc.
Most of Rob's work is available electronically in preprint or published form at the above locations, but there are a few things not (yet) posted there:
For example, in April 2003, Rob and two of his students went to hear Grisha Perelman lecture at MIT about geometrization of three-manifolds via Ricci Flow -- here is our triptych, Three-manifolds according to Grisha Perelman (.ps) (.pdf), of the event. Versions of our article also appear in the 2003 UMass Math Dept Newsletter, and in the popular Japanese math journal _Sugaku_ (v. 42, no. 10, pp. 4-6, September 2003).
Four years later (April 2007) our department head, Eduardo Cattani, wanted to update this topic (now that Perelman was awarded - and has declined! - the 2006 Fields Medal for his work in this area), so we each wrote short articles for the 2007 UMass Math Dept Newsletter about the Poincare and Geometrization Conjectures. Here's an .html version of Rob's article A Bit of (Cosmic) Background which includes some links to the classical literature mentioned therein.
Here's where you can get the (semifinal: April 2003) Postscript and (final: May 2004) PDF versions of Rob's Clay/MSRI Summer 2001 note on Conformal Structures and Necksizes of CMC Surfaces (Postscript) (PDF) which supersede the arXiv version from July 2002. This volume was finally published by the AMS late in 2005.
And here is where you can read the October 1998 Science News cover
story by Ivars Petersen of how Kusner's Minimax
Sphere Eversion was computed and animated. (Compare with Rob's
original account [ PDF
version], written in 1995 when Ken Brakke and John Sullivan were
working on the first animation with him at GANG.)
Bio
Rob Kusner is Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Center for Geometry, Analysis, Numerics and Graphics (GANG). His research focuses on variational problems in low dimensional geometry and topology, with applications in the natural sciences. Most of his work has focused on minimal and constant mean curvature surfaces, as well as on the the geometry of energy minimizing knots and links.
Kusner has been involved with GANG since its inception in the 1980's, and became its Co-Director in 1993, after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on an NSF Fellowship. Rob returned to the IAS, and also participated in the special geometric topology year at MSRI in Berkeley, during the 1996-97 academic year. During his 2003-04 sabbatical, Rob has again been in the Bay Area, participating in the MSRI special year in geometry, and working with colleagues at Berkeley, Stanford and (just over the mountains, a few more hours to the east) Utah.
For the Spring of 1996, Rob was visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was also a member of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. He has also served as a faculty member at Stanford (1987-88), at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1988-89), at Rice (1992) and at the Universite de Tours, France (2003-). Rob organized the NSF-supported Five Colleges Geometry Institute, serving as its first research director (1990-91). (More on all this is documented in Rob's CV.)
In 1995, Kusner joined the editorial board of the journal Experimental Mathematics. He invites mathematicians working in all areas of geometric analysis and topology to consider publishing their highest quality experimental work here. A related but more recent (2005) editorial project is Media-Enhanced Mathematics.
Rob is often working with honors students, such as James Lawrence, who has written the program HYPERMAN for viewing four-dimensional objects; Elyse Fosse, who investigated optimally packed helical tubes; Lillian Carasquillo, who worked on the geometry of knotted bands; and Evan Innis, who is finishing a senior thesis on knotted ribbons and raceways (two versions of "flattened rope").
Here is a compendium of Kusner's research papers in the GANG Preprint Series. Some of Rob's recent work can also be found in Kusner's Mathematical Giftshop, or in his curriculum vitae. Rob also enjoys sharing some of his more amusing inventions with the public.
An alternative transportation advocate, Kusner has served for many years on the Town of Amherst Public Transportation and Bicycle Committee, which he chaired from 1998-2000. In 2007, Rob became the Chair of the Massachuestts Department of Conservation and Recreation's Norwottuck Rail Trail Advisory Committee. He is also a founding board member of the Norwottuck Network (a non-profit Massachusetts corporation dedicated to helping acquire cycling and hiking trail easements and to preserving their environs), and was a member of the Amherst Conservation Commission (2000-03).
In the Spring of 2005 Rob's neighbors (again) asked him to run for one of the seats on the Town of Amherst's five-member Select Board to which Rob was elected (for any Town business, please contact Rob through his Gmail account: robkusner@gmail.com). The Town is still grappling with the form of government it will ultimately adopt, but for now it appears that Town Meeting and the Select Board have been reenergized, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the controversies of the "Kusner (2005-2008) era" in Amherst. Cognizant of the fate of another bearded American leader during an earlier constitutionally divisive time, Rob decided to not seek re-election in 2008.
(By the way, if the above photo looks unfamiliar, occasionally Rob shaves :-)
Address
1435G Lederle Graduate Research Tower
Department of Mathematics
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
USA
Phone 413 545 6022
Lab 413 545 4605
Secretary 413 545 0510
Fax 413 545 1801
Electronic Mail rob@gang.umass.edu
All material on this website is Copyleft* by Rob Kusner.