David Trotman

David Trotman

David Trotman in Cracow (2004)
Born September 27, 1951
Plymouth
Thesis Whitney Stratifications : Faults and Detectors (1980)
Doctoral advisor Erik Christopher Zeeman and René Thom

David John Angelo Trotman[1] (born September 27, 1951) is a mathematician, with dual British and French nationality. He was born on September 27, 1951 in Plymouth, Devon, England, a grandson of the poet and author Oliver W F Lodge and a great-grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. He is a leading expert in an area of singularity theory known as the theory of stratifications, and particularly on properties of stratifications satisfying the Whitney conditions and other similar conditions (due to René Thom, Tzee-Char Kuo, Jean-Louis Verdier, Trotman himself, and Karim Bekka for example) important for understanding topological stability.[2]

At the age of 16, with Philip Crabtree, he was awarded the Explorer Belt in Izmir, Turkey. They were placed second of the seven winning pairs, out of 41 competing teams who walked 150 miles from near Balıkesir to the coast west of Izmir, via Soma and Bergama, in August 1968, undertaking a dozen set projects as they went.

From 1958 to 1962 Trotman attended Gig Mill School, Stourbridge, Worcestershire, where he was in the same class as Kay Partridge, now Dame Kay Davies. He was educated at King Edward's School in Stourbridge, before entering St. John's College, Cambridge in 1969, where he won the John Couch Adams Essay Prize in 1971 for an essay on plane algebraic curves. He carried out doctoral work at the University of Warwick, and the University of Paris-Sud, Orsay. His thesis, entitled Whitney Stratifications : Faults and Detectors, was directed by Christopher Zeeman while at Warwick, and Bernard Teissier and René Thom while at Orsay, although Terry Wall and Robert MacPherson were major influences.[1]

After positions at the Paris-Sud and the University of Angers, since 1988 Trotman has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Provence in Marseilles, France. He has held visiting positions at Aarhus University, the University of Pisa, Cornell University, the University of Hawaii, the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, England, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, USA, and the Fields Institute in Toronto, Canada.

Trotman has directed nine PhD theses. Among his research students are Patrice Orro, Karim Bekka, Stéphane Simon, Claudio Murolo, Georges Comte, Dwi Juniati and Guillaume Valette.[1]

His Erdős number is 4.

Trotman was Director of the Graduate School in Mathematics and Computing of Marseilles from 1996 to 2004, and was an elected member of the CNU (the French National University Council) from 1999 until 2007.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 David Trotman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Trotman's, David. "David Trotman's Homepage". Retrieved 2008-09-21.

External links