Clifford Taubes

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Clifford Taubes
NAS Award in Mathematics (2008)
Veblen Prize (1991)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematical physics
InstitutionsHarvard University
Thesis The Structure of Static Euclidean Gauge Fields  (1980)
Doctoral advisorArthur Jaffe
Doctoral studentsMichael Hutchings
Tomasz Mrowka

Clifford Henry Taubes (born February 21, 1954)[1] is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and works in gauge field theory, differential geometry, and low-dimensional topology. His brother is the journalist Gary Taubes.

Early career

Taubes received his PhD in physics in 1980 under the direction of Arthur Jaffe, having proven results collected in (Jaffe & Taubes 1980) about the existence of solutions to the Landau–Ginzburg vortex equations and the Bogomol'nyi monopole equations.

Soon, he began applying his gauge-theoretic expertise to pure mathematics. His work on the boundary of the

elliptic genus
.

Work based on Seiberg–Witten theory

In a series of four long papers in the 1990s (collected in

pseudoholomorphic curves and is now known as Taubes's Gromov invariant
. This fact improved mathematicians' understanding of the topology of symplectic four-manifolds.

More recently (in

contact manifolds, thus establishing that the Reeb vector field on such a manifold always has a closed orbit. Expanding both on this and on the equivalence of the Seiberg–Witten and Gromov invariants, Taubes has also proven (in a long series of preprints, beginning with Taubes 2008
)) that a contact 3-manifold's embedded contact homology is isomorphic to a version of its Seiberg–Witten Floer cohomology. More recently, Taubes, C. Kutluhan and Y-J. Lee proved that Seiberg–Witten Floer homology is isomorphic to Heegaard Floer homology.

Honors and awards

Books

References

  1. ^ "1991 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry Awarded in San Francisco" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 38 (3): 182. March 1991.
  2. ^ Taubes, Clifford Henry (1998). "The geometry of the Seiblrg-Witten invariants". Doc. Math. (Bielefeld) Extra Vol. ICM Berlin, 1998, vol. II. pp. 493–504.
  3. ^ "NAS Award in Mathematics". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 29 December 2010. Retrieved 13 February 2011.

External links