Dennis Sullivan

Dennis Parnell Sullivan (born 1941, Port Huron, Michigan) is an American mathematician. He is known for work in topology, both algebraic and geometric, and on dynamical systems. He holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the City University of New York, and is a professor at Stony Brook University.

[edit] Work

His doctorate from 1966 was from Princeton University. His thesis, titled Triangulating homotopy equivalences, was written under the supervision of William Browder. He was a permanent member of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques for about twenty years.

Sullivan is one of the founders of the surgery method of classifying high-dimensional manifolds, along with Browder, Sergei Novikov and C. T. C. Wall. In homotopy theory, Sullivan put forward the radical concept that spaces could directly be localised, a procedure hitherto applied to the algebraic constructs made from them. He founded (along with Daniel Quillen) rational homotopy theory.

The Sullivan conjecture, proved in its original form by Haynes Miller, states that the classifying space BG of a finite group G is sufficiently different from any finite CW complex X, that it maps to such an X only 'with difficulty'; in a more formal statement, the space of all mappings BG to X, as pointed spaces and given the compact-open topology, is weakly contractible. This area has generated considerable further research. (Both these matters are discussed in his 1970 MIT notes.)

In 1985, he proved the No wandering domain theorem. The Parry-Sullivan invariant is named after him and the English mathematician Bill Parry.

In 1987, he proved Thurston's conjecture about the approximation of the Riemann map by circle packings together with Burton Rodin.

Awards include the 1971 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, the 1981 Prix Élie Cartan of the French Academy of Sciences, the King Faisal International Prize for Science in 1994, the 2004 National Medal of Science and the 2006 AMS Steele Prize.

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