2025 Thurston Lectures
The Thurston Lectures are named after Fields Medalist and former UC Davis mathematician William Thurston. The next Thurston Lecture series will be given by Henry Cohn (Microsoft Research/MIT) and Daniel Litt (University of Toronto) on May 12-16, 2025.
Series title: To Be Announced.
Detailed schedule:
To be announced.
About the speakers
Henry Cohn graduated from Harvard University in 2000 with a doctorate in mathematics under the direction of Noam Elkies. Dr. Cohn is currently on the scientific staff of Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at MIT. He is well known for his contributions to discrete mathematics. E.g., in collaboration with Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Maryna Viazovska, he solved the sphere packing problem in 24 dimensions. Cohn was an Erdős Lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2008. In 2016, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society "e;for contributions to discrete mathematics, including applications to computer science and physics." In 2018, he was awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize for his article "A Conceptual Breakthrough in Sphere Packing," published in 2017 in the Notices of the AMS.
Daniel Litt is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, working at the intersection of algebraic geometry, number theory, and topology. After receiving his PhD in 2015 from Stanford, he held positions at the University of Georgia, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Columbia University. He is a Sloan Research Fellow, an invited speaker at the 2024 Current Developments in Mathematics conference, and a recipient of the Ontario Early Researcher Award.
About William Paul Thurston
William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946 – August 21, 2012) was among the most original and influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. He transformed the mathematics of foliations, low-dimensional topology, hyperbolic manifolds, the theory of rational maps, and geometric group theory. His work led to a fundamental rethinking of the structure of 3-dimensional spaces.
Thurston received a bachelor's degree from New College in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1972. He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study and a year at MIT before being appointed Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University in 1974. In 1991 he moved to UC Berkeley and in 1993 he was appointed Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. In 1996 he moved again, this time to UC Davis, where he was a Professor of Mathematics until 2003, when he moved to Cornell. Bill was in the process of returning to UC Davis in 2012 when he tragically passed away.
Thurston’s work revealed the unexpectedly central role played by hyperbolic geometry in the study of low-dimensional manifolds. His Geometrization Conjecture, which he solved in many cases, changed the fundamental viewpoint from which mathematicians approached the study of manifolds.
Thurston was awarded the Veblen Prize in Geometry in 1976, the Fields Medal at the 1983 International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw and the Leroy P. Steele Prize for seminal contribution to research in 2012. Thurston had numerous Ph.D. students, many of whom became leading mathematicians themselves.
"Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverence at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity."
–Bill Thurston, "About me" on MathOverflow