Jeffrey Renwick Weeks (born December 10, 1956) is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

, a geometric topologist and cosmologist. Weeks is a 1999 MacArthur Fellow.

Biography

Weeks received his BA from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

in 1978, and his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

in 1985, under the supervision of

William Thurston William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. Thurst ...

. Since then he has taught at Stockton State College,

Ithaca College Ithaca College is a private college in Ithaca (town), New York, Ithaca, New York. It was founded by William Egbert in 1892 as a Music school, conservatory of music. Ithaca College is known for its media-related programs and entertainment program ...

, and

Middlebury College Middlebury College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont, United States. Founded in 1800 by Congregationalism in the United States, Congregationalists, Middlebury w ...

, but has spent much of his time as a free-lance mathematician.

Research

Weeks' research contributions have mainly been in the field of

3-manifold In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a topological space that locally looks like a three-dimensional Euclidean space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane (geometry), plane (a tangent ...

s and

physical cosmology Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fu ...

. The

Weeks manifold In mathematics, the Weeks manifold, sometimes called the Fomenko–Matveev–Weeks manifold, is a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold obtained by (5, 2) and (5, 1) Dehn surgery, Dehn surgeries on the Whitehead link. It has volume approximately ...

, discovered in 1985 by Weeks, is the hyperbolic 3-manifold with the minimum possible volume. Weeks has written various computer programs to assist in mathematical research and mathematical visualization. His SnapPea program is used to study hyperbolic 3-manifolds, while he has also developed interactive software to introduce these ideas to middle-school, high-school, and college students. Weeks is particularly interested in using

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

to understand the spatial universe. His book ''The Shape of Space: How to Visualize Surfaces and Three-dimensional Manifolds'' (Marcel Dekker, 1985, ) explores the geometry and topology of low-dimensional

manifold In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a N ...

s. The second edition (2002, ) explains some of his work in applying the material to cosmology.

Awards and honors

Weeks became a MacArthur Fellow in 1999. In 2007, he won the Levi L. Conant Prize for his expository paper, "The Poincaré Dodecahedral Space and the Mystery of the Missing Fluctuations" (''Notices of the AMS'' 2004),. and in 2008 he gave the first Levi Conant Lecture at the

Worcester Polytechnic Institute The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is a Private university, private research university in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1865, WPI was one of the United States' first engineering and technology universities and now h ...

, where Conant was head of the Mathematics Department from 1908 until his untimely death.

References

External links

*
Weeks' Topology and Geometry software website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weeks, Jeffrey Living people American topologists American cosmologists Dartmouth College alumni Princeton University alumni MacArthur Fellows 1956 births 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists