John Morgan (mathematician)


John Willard Morgan is an American mathematician, with contributions to topology and geometry.

Life

He received his B.A. in 1968 and Ph.D. in 1969, both from Rice University. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled Stable tangential homotopy equivalences, was written under the supervision of Morton L. Curtis. He was an instructor at Princeton University from 1969 to 1972, and an assistant professor at MIT from 1972 to 1974. He has been on the faculty at Columbia University since 1974. In July 2009, he moved to Stony Brook University to become the first director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, a research center devoted to the interface between mathematics and physics. As of the Fall of 2019, he teaches the graduate class "Algebraic Topology" at Columbia.
He is an editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society and Geometry and Topology.
He collaborated with Gang Tian in verifying Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture. The Morgan–Tian team was one of three teams formed for this purpose; the other teams were those of Huai-Dong Cao and Xi-Ping Zhu, and Bruce Kleiner and John Lott. Morgan gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid on August 24, 2006, declaring that "in 2003, Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture."

Awards and honors

In 2008 he was awarded a Gauss Lectureship by the German Mathematical Society. In 2009 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Selected publications

Articles