2021
Yevgeny Liokumovich
Sloan Fellowship will enable in-person collaboration for mathematician specializing in topology
2021
Sloan Fellowship will enable in-person collaboration for mathematician specializing in topology
For Yevgeny Liokumovich, a mathematician at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a major problem presented by the COVID-19 pandemic has been the inability to collaborate with colleagues in person. But now, with travel restrictions easing and financial support from winning a 2021 Sloan Fellowship, Dr. Liokumovich will be able to travel to meet with his international collaborators to advance his work in geometric analysis.
“I think that’s really important because math, especially right now, is a very collaborative enterprise,” he says. “You really need to talk to people. And that’s been harder because of the pandemic. Sometimes you need to get people in the same room to make progress.”
Dr. Liokumovich’s research focuses on spaces and their properties. “For example, a long time ago we thought the Earth was flat. And then gradually we realized it has a more complicated shape. It looked flat to us but globally, it curves. The same can be said about high-dimensional spaces,” he explains.
“When you actually approach them in a more mathematical, rigorous way, you can discover things that are difficult to imagine. You encounter things that you wouldn’t think of immediately. You can describe spaces that are quite interesting and complicated. You can try to understand what they are, what kinds of properties they can have.”
That’s what a lot of my work is about: considering these simpler spaces inside these complicated large spaces, and how they relate to each other.”
The importance of this area of research lies in applications ranging from robotics to data analysis in cancer research, he says.
“Geometry in itself is important because we can geometrize many problems that don’t initially appear to have any relationship to geometry…There have been many instances where geometrics techniques have been applied very practically for problems in medical imaging and physics and engineering.”
Dr. Liokumovich said he had had some hesitations about applying for the Sloan Fellowship but was encouraged by the chair of his department.
“I’m really grateful for that,” he says. “It was the right decision.”
