Geoffrey Mess

Geoffrey Mess (born February 19, 1960 in Montreal - † August 8, 2014 ) was a Canadian mathematician who studied geometric group theory and topology.

Mess was already noticeable at school for his mathematical talent (he skipped two classes), studied from 1976 at the University of Waterloo with a bachelor's degree in 1980 and he was trained by Andrew Casson (and John Stallings ) at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 , is doing her doctorate with a dissertation on Torelli groups (The Torelli Groups for Genus 2 and 3 Surface). He was Hedrick Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he became Assistant Professor in 1988 and Associate Professor in 1992. After a long illness (from which he had suffered for 20 years and which had also reduced his mathematical productivity), he died in 2014.

He contributed to the final solution of the Seifert fiber space conjecture ( David Gabai , Andrew Casson, Douglas Jungreis et al.). His 1987 contribution was influential but unpublished and only available as a preprint (although it was sent to the AMS Journal for publication).

The Bestvina Mess formula (1991) and the characterization of three-dimensional GHMC manifolds in Mess's theorem come from him.

In 1990 he became a Sloan Research Fellow .

In addition to mathematics, he was interested in many other areas (among other things, he studied Russian, German and, most recently, Persian). His hobbies included hiking in the wilderness and kayaking.

His brother Derek is a professor of chemical and bioengineering at Tufts University .

Web links

• Obituary at UCLA

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Geoffrey Mess in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ↑ Danny Calegari, Groups quasiisometric to the plane , Blog Geometry and the Imagination 2014 (obituary for Mess with a link to the preprint of Mess)
3. ↑ Mess, Lorentz spacetimes of constant curvature, MSRI Preprint 1990, Geometria Dedicata, Volume 126, 2007, pp. 3-45, Arxiv