Frank Morgan (mathematician)

Frank Morgan is an American mathematician and the Webster Atwell '21 Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, specialising in geometric measure theory and minimal surfaces.

Double bubble
For the actor "Frank Morgan", see Frank Morgan.
Frank Morgan
NationalityAmerican
Alma materMIT
Princeton University
Known forProving Double Bubble conjecture
AwardsNational Science Foundation research grant, (1977-2006, 2008-)
First National Distinguished Teaching Award (1992)
Princeton University, 250-Anniversary Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching (1997–98)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsWilliams College
Doctoral advisorFrederick Almgren Jr.

He is most famous for proving the Double Bubble conjecture, that the minimum-surface-area enclosure of two given volumes is formed by three spherical patches meeting at 120-degree angles at a common circle. Morgan was a vice-president-elect of the American Mathematical Society.[1]

Morgan studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1977, under the supervision of Frederick J. Almgren Jr.. He taught at MIT for ten years before joining the Williams faculty.[2][3]

Current work

Frank Morgan is the founder of SMALL, one of the largest and best known summer undergraduate Mathematics research programs. The National Science Foundation has recently announced the award of a three-year $145,445 grant to him. Morgan and his students will research manifolds with density, a generalization of Riemannian manifolds, long prominent in probability and of rapidly growing interest in geometry. Manifolds, or topological spaces that are locally Euclidean, can be understood intuitively as surfaces. This work will build on research conducted by Morgan and his students over the summer.

Specifically, Morgan intends to approach this area by studying the isoperimetric problem for manifolds with density such as Gauss space, the premier example of a manifold with density. Isoperimetric problems, which involve finding a closed curve of fixed length, which encloses the greatest area in the plane, have applications in probability theory, in Riemannian geometry, and in Grigori Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré conjecture.[4]

Frank Morgan is also an avid dancer. He gained temporary fame for his work "Dancing the Parkway".[5]

Awards and honors

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[6]

Books
  • Calculus Lite (1995)
  • Real Analysis and Applications
  • Geometric Measure Theory
  • The Math Chat Book
  • Riemannian Geometry: A Beginners Guide (1998)

Notes
  1. "Election Results". American Mathematical Society home page. 2008-11-27. Retrieved 2008-11-27.
  2. Frank Morgan at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  3. Bio from Morgan's web site.
  4. "Morgan gets NSF grant". Williams College Mathematics and Statistics Department home page. 2008-11-10. Archived from the original on 2011-07-17. Retrieved 2008-11-21.
  5. "Dancing the Parkway". Frank Morgan's Blog. Retrieved 2009-02-25.
  6. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-02-10.
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