David Trotman
David John Angelo Trotman is a mathematician, with dual British and French nationality. He is a grandson of the poet and author Oliver W F Lodge and a great-grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. He works in an area of singularity theory known as the theory of stratifications, and particularly on properties of stratifications satisfying the Whitney conditions and other similar conditions important for understanding topological stability.
At the age of 16, with Philip Crabtree, he was awarded the Explorer Belt in Izmir, Turkey.
Trotman was educated at King Edward's School in Stourbridge, before entering St. John's College, Cambridge in 1969, where he won the John Couch Adams Essay Prize in 1971 for an essay on plane algebraic curves. He carried out doctoral work at the University of Warwick, and the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay. His thesis, entitled Whitney Stratifications: Faults and Detectors, was directed by Christopher Zeeman and C. T. C. Wall while at Warwick, and Bernard Teissier and René Thom while at Orsay.
After positions at the University of Paris-Sud and the University of Angers, since 1988 Trotman has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Provence in Marseille, France, now called Aix-Marseille University. He has held visiting positions at Cornell University, the University of Hawaii, the Isaac Newton Institute of the University of Cambridge, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and the Fields Institute in Toronto, Canada.
Trotman has directed eleven PhD theses. Among his research students are , Karim Bekka, , , Dwi Juniati and .
Trotman was Director of the from 1996 to 2004, and was an elected member of the CNU from 1999 until 2007.
