Andrew Casson
Mathematician
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Andrew John Casson FRS (1943 – September 5, 2025) was a mathematician, working in the area of geometric topology. Casson was the Philip Schuyler Beebe Professor of Mathematics[1] at Yale University until his retirement.
Fellow of the Royal Society (1998)
Andrew Casson | |
|---|---|
Andrew Casson at Berkeley in 1991 Photo courtesy George M. Bergman | |
| Born | 1943 |
| Died | September 5, 2025 (aged 81–82) Fairfield, Connecticut, U.S.A. |
| Alma mater | University of Liverpool |
| Awards | Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (1991) Fellow of the Royal Society (1998) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Yale University University of California, Berkeley University of Texas at Austin |
| Doctoral advisor | C. T. C. Wall |
| Doctoral students | (in chronological order) Andrew Ranicki, Darren Long, Ken'ichi Kuga, Geoffrey Mess, Kevin Walker, Gregory Kuperberg, Marc Shepard, Douglas Jungreis, Edith Starr, Micah Fogel, Michah Sageev, Luis Valdez Sanchez, Daniel Allcock, Linda Green, Inkang Kim, Mayhew Wolff, Mahan Mitra, Kevin Hartshorn, Aaron Abrams, Stephen Bigelow, Danny Calegari, Sungjoon Ko, Karen Edwards, Saul Schleimer, Sang-Hyun Kim, Joan Licata, Helen Wong |
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.[2] 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.[3]
Work
Casson 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-manifolds, and Casson handles, used in Michael Freedman's proof of the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture.[4][5][6]
Awards
In 1991, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by the American Mathematical Society.[7] In 1998, he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society.[8]
