Andrew John Casson FRS (born 1943) is a mathematician, studying geometric topology. Casson is the Philip Schuyler Beebe Professor of Mathematics[ Andrew Casson named the Beebe Professor of Mathematics, Yale Daily Bulletin, June 10, 2011.] at Yale University.
Education and career
Casson was educated at Latymer Upper School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in the Mathematical Tripos in 1965.
['University News: Cambridge Tripos Results', Times, 21 June 1965.] His doctoral advisor at the University of Liverpool was C. T. C. Wall, but he never completed his doctorate; instead what would have been his Ph.D. thesis became his fellowship dissertation as a research fellow at Trinity College.
Casson was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin between 1981 and 1986, at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1986 to 2000, and has been at Yale since 2000.
Work
Casson has worked in both high-dimensional manifold topology and 3- and 4-dimensional
topology,
using both geometric and algebraic techniques. Among other discoveries, he contributed
to the disproof of the manifold
Hauptvermutung, introduced the
Casson invariant, a modern invariant for 3-
, and
, used in
Michael Freedman's proof of the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture.
Awards
In 1991, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by the American Mathematical Society. In 1998, he was elected to Fellowship of the
Royal Society.
External links
