Selman Akbulut
Encyclopedia
Selman Akbulut is a Turkish
Turkish people
Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...
mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
and a Professor at Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
. He got his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
in 1975 as a student of Robion Kirby
Robion Kirby
Robion Cromwell Kirby is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in low-dimensional topology...
. He is an expert on handlebody
Handlebody
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, a handlebody is a decomposition of a manifold into standard pieces. Handlebodies play an important role in Morse theory, cobordism theory and the surgery theory of high-dimensional manifolds...
theory, low dimensional manifold
Manifold
In mathematics , a manifold is a topological space that on a small enough scale resembles the Euclidean space of a specific dimension, called the dimension of the manifold....
s, symplectic topology
Symplectic topology
Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology which studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form...
and G2 manifold
G2 manifold
In differential geometry, a G2 manifold is a seven-dimensional Riemannian manifold with holonomy group G2. The group G_2 is one of the five exceptional simple Lie groups...
s, and also has done groundbreaking work on topology
Topology
Topology is a major area of mathematics concerned with properties that are preserved under continuous deformations of objects, such as deformations that involve stretching, but no tearing or gluing...
of real algebraic sets in collaboration with Henry C. King. His most recent results are strongly related to resolution of 4-dimensional smooth
Smooth
Smooth means having a texture that lacks friction. Not rough.Smooth may also refer to:-In mathematics:* Smooth function, a function that is infinitely differentiable; used in calculus and topology...
Poincare conjecture
Poincaré conjecture
In mathematics, the Poincaré conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the three-dimensional sphere , which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space...
. He has supervised 10 Ph.D students as of 2011. He has more than 80 papers and 2 books published, and several books edited.
Akbulut knotting corks
Akbulut cork
In topology an Akbulut cork is a structure is frequently used to show that in four dimensions, the smooth h-cobordism theorem fails. It was named after Selman Akbulut....
are named after him.