Skip to the Main Content

Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

May 26, 2016

Good News

Posted by John Baez

Various bits of good news concerning my former students Alissa Crans, Derek Wise, Jeffrey Morton and Chris Rogers.

Alissa Crans did her thesis on Lie 2-Algebras back in 2004. She got hired by Loyola Marymount University, got tenure there in 2011… and a couple of weeks ago she got promoted to full professor! Hurrah!

Derek Wise did his thesis on Topological Gauge Theory, Cartan Geometry, and Gravity in 2007. After a stint at U. C. Davis he went to Erlangen in 2010. When I was in Erlangen in the spring of 2014 he was working with Catherine Meusberger on gauge theory with Hopf algebras replacing groups, and a while back they came out with a great paper on that: Hopf algebra gauge theory on a ribbon graph. But the good news is this: last fall, he got a tenure-track job at Concordia University St Paul!

Jeffrey Morton did his thesis on Extended TQFT’s and Quantum Gravity in 2007. After postdocs at the University of Western Ontario, the Instituto Superior Técnico, Universität Hamburg, Mount Allison University and a visiting assistant professorship at Toledo University, he has gotten a tenure-track job at SUNY Buffalo State! I guess he’ll start there in the fall.

They’re older and wiser now, but here’s what they looked like once:

From left to right it’s Derek Wise, Jeffrey Morton and Alissa Crans… and then two more students of mine: Toby Bartels and Miguel Carrión Álvarez.

And one more late-breaking piece of news! Chris Rogers wrote his thesis on Higher Symplectic Geometry in 2011. After postdocs at Göttingen and the University of Greifswald, and a lot of great work on higher structures, he got a tenure-track job at the University of Louisiana. But now he’s accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Nevada at Reno, where his wife teaches dance. This solves a long-running two-body problem for them!

Posted at May 26, 2016 4:12 AM UTC

TrackBack URL for this Entry:   https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/dxy-tb.fcgi/2886

17 Comments & 0 Trackbacks

Re: Good News

Wow, congratulations to all three of them! (I think you might have their names out of order below the photo though.)

Posted by: Mike Shulman on May 26, 2016 10:31 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

this is the “my left”/”their left” problem.

Posted by: Jesse C. McKeown on May 26, 2016 11:44 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

No, it was the “I’m not looking at the picture while I’m typing” picture.

Posted by: John Baez on May 26, 2016 3:10 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

Great news guys :).

Posted by: Jamie Vicary on May 29, 2016 5:25 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

Congratulations!

Posted by: Joao Streibel on May 29, 2016 10:13 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

More good news! I’ll add it to the blog article, but: Chris Rogers just got a nice tenure-track position at the University of Nevada at Reno, where his wife teaches dance. This solves a long-running two-body problem for them.

Posted by: John Baez on June 3, 2016 4:52 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

John, what about your other student James Dolan? What happened to him?

Posted by: j on June 5, 2016 2:33 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

He is now a grad student at Macquarie University. When I last checked, he was giving a seminar on doctrines of algebraic geometry, the topic he’d been most interested in when he was last at U.C. Riverside.

Posted by: John Baez on June 5, 2016 3:20 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

Here is a list of James Dolan’s 30 talks at the Australian Category Seminar (there are no abstracts to click on).

I wonder why there have been no seminar talks in 2016 by anybody. I thought that maybe since Australia is upside down the seminar was on summer break, but perusal of past talks shows they have continued through the summer.

Posted by: RodMcGuire on June 8, 2016 1:53 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

The videos of Jim’s talks still give an error message. Can anyone fix the videos as the subject matter looks very interesting?

Posted by: Tim Porter on June 9, 2016 6:08 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

James Dolan and I have quite a number of talk videos on the UCR website. Unfortunately the computer people at UCR keep doing things that make videos not work. This weekend I got them to fix this problem again. They fixed it by moving all the videos to Google Drive, where you can either download them and/or view them in streaming format. They are here. Unfortunately it will take me a while to figure out which videos are which… Bertram Kostant’s talk on E8 is easy to spot!

James’ Macquarie talks on algebraic geometry would probably be more interesting than his UCR talks, since he’s a had a couple more years to work on this topic. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone who is taking notes and/or making videos.

Posted by: John Baez on June 9, 2016 7:05 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

The Google drive link did not work for me. Perhaps I am doing something wrong???

Posted by: Tim Porter on June 9, 2016 11:01 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

Sorry, I made a mistake creating the link. It seems to work now; try it again!

Posted by: John Baez on June 9, 2016 4:10 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

That looks better. I may try them out later on.

Posted by: Tim Porter on June 9, 2016 6:48 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

There are notes being taken, perhaps by Garner. I asked someone a while back and they sent what had been covered up to that point. It didn’t seem like much on paper because Jim takes his time to explain things in detail.

Posted by: David Roberts on June 11, 2016 11:23 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

Rod,

seminar talks are continuing (I’m on the mailing list), so presumably the website is just not being updated.

Posted by: David Roberts on June 8, 2016 3:22 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Good News

Congrats to Alissa, Derek, Jeffrey, and Chris. I’m very happy to hear this news.

Posted by: Bruce Bartlett on July 12, 2016 7:05 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Post a New Comment