Selman Akbulut is a Turkish mathematician and a Professor at Michigan State University. He got his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 as a student of Robion Kirby. He is an expert on handlebody theory, low dimensional manifolds, symplectic topology and G2 manifolds, and also has done groundbreaking work on topology of real algebraic sets in collaboration with Henry C. King (for example they proved that every compact PL manifold is a real algebraic set, and discovered new topological invariants of real algebraic sets).
He is well known for developing 4-dimensional handlebody techniques, settling long standing conjectures and solving difficult problems about 4-manifolds, such as Zeeman conjecture, Harer-Kas-Kirby conjecture, Scharlemann and Cappell-Shaneson problems. He is the architect of the smallest known exotic compact 4-manifold (with boundary) from which he discovered corks.
His most recent results are strongly related to resolution of 4-dimensional smooth Poincare conjecture. He has supervised 10 Ph.D students as of 2011. He has more than 80 papers and 2 books published, and several books edited.
Akbulut corks are named after him.