Dennis Parnell Sullivan was born on February 12,1941 and is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology, geometric topology, and dynamical systems.
12 Facts About Dennis Sullivan
2.
Dennis Sullivan holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the City University of New York Graduate Center and is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University.
3.
Dennis Sullivan was born in Port Huron, Michigan, on February 12,1941.
4.
Dennis Sullivan entered Rice University to study chemical engineering but switched his major to mathematics in his second year after encountering a particularly motivating mathematical theorem.
5.
Dennis Sullivan received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Rice in 1963.
6.
Dennis Sullivan obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University in 1966 with his thesis, Triangulating homotopy equivalences, under the supervision of William Browder.
7.
Dennis Sullivan worked at the University of Warwick on a NATO Fellowship from 1966 to 1967.
8.
Dennis Sullivan was a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1969 and then a Sloan Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1969 to 1973.
9.
Dennis Sullivan was an associate professor at Paris-Sud University from 1973 to 1974, and then became a permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in 1974.
10.
Dennis Sullivan joined the mathematics faculty at Stony Brook University in 1996 and left the IHES the following year.
11.
Dennis Sullivan was involved in the founding of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and is a member of its board of trustees.
12.
The Dennis Sullivan conjecture, proved in its original form by Haynes Miller, states that the classifying space BG of a finite group G is sufficiently different from any finite CW complex X, that it maps to such an X only 'with difficulty'; in a more formal statement, the space of all mappings BG to X, as pointed spaces and given the compact-open topology, is weakly contractible.