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American mathematician From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sylvain Edward Cappell (born 1946), a Belgian American mathematician and former student of William Browder at Princeton University, is a topologist who has spent most of his career at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, where he is now the Silver Professor of Mathematics.
Sylvain Cappell | |
|---|---|
Sylvain Cappell (right) | |
| Born | 1946 (age 77–78) Brussels, Belgium |
| Nationality | Belgian, American |
| Alma mater | Princeton University Columbia University |
| Awards | AMS Distinguished Public Service Award (2018) Guggenheim Fellowship (1989–90) Sloan Fellowship (1971–72) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | New York University |
| Doctoral advisor | William Browder |
| Doctoral students | Shmuel Weinberger |
He was born in Brussels, Belgium and immigrated with his parents to New York City in 1950 and grew up largely in this city.[1] In 1963, as a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, he won first place in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for his work on "The Theory of Semi-cyclical Groups with Special Reference to Non-Aristotelian Logic." He then graduated from Columbia University in 1966, winning the Van Amringe Mathematical Prize.[2] He is best known for his "codimension one splitting theorem",[3] which is a standard tool in high-dimensional geometric topology, and a number of important results proven with his collaborator Julius Shaneson (now at the University of Pennsylvania). Their work includes many results in knot theory (and broad generalizations of that subject)[4] and aspects of low-dimensional topology. They gave the first nontrivial examples of topological conjugacy of linear transformations,[5] which led to a flowering of research on the topological study of spaces with singularities.[6]
More recently, they combined their understanding of singularities, first to lattice point counting in polytopes, then to Euler-Maclaurin type summation formulae,[7] and most recently to counting lattice points in the circle.[8] This last problem is a classical one, initiated by Gauss, and the paper is still being vetted by experts. [citation needed]
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[9] Cappell was elected and served as a vice president of the AMS for the term of February 2010 through January 2013.[10][11] In 2018 he was elected to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[12]
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