Ian Agol
Ian Agol is an American mathematician who deals primarily with the topology of three-dimensional manifolds.Education and career
Agol obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of California, San Diego with Michael Freedman. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.Contributions
In 2004, Agol proved the Marden tameness conjecture, a conjecture of Albert Marden. It states that a hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely generated fundamental group is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact 3-manifold. The conjecture was also independently proven by Danny Calegari and David Gabai, and implies the Ahlfors measure conjecture.
In 2012 he announced a proof of the virtually Haken conjecture, which was published a year later. The conjecture states that every aspherical 3-manifold is finitely covered by a Haken manifold.Awards and honors
Agol, Calegari, and Gabai received the 2009 Clay Research Award for their proof of the Marden tameness conjecture.
In 2005, Agol was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
In 2013, Agol was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, along with Daniel Wise.
In 2015, he was awarded the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, "for spectacular contributions to low dimensional topology and geometric group theory, including work on the solutions of the tameness, virtually Haken and virtual fibering conjectures."
In 2016 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.Personal
His twin brother,, is an astronomy professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
