Jeffrey Brock, an internationally recognized mathematician, was recently appointed the William S. Massey Professor of Mathematics and professor of statistics and data science, effective immediately.
Brock, who has been a member of Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in the Department of Mathematics, since joining the Yale faculty in 2018, has also been dean of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science since 2019, a role to which he was reappointed in July. He also served as the FAS Dean of Science from 2019 to 2022.
He previously held faculty positions at the University of Chicago and Brown University. At Brown, he served as the founding co-PI and Deputy Director for the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, chaired the Department of Mathematics from 2013 to 2017 and, in 2016, he served as founding director of Brown’s Data Science Initiative.
Jeffrey Brock
William S. Massey Professor of Mathematics and professor of statistics and data science
Dean, Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science
Brock’s scholarly publications in mathematics focus primarily on research problems in geometry and topology: broadly, this area investigates the dual nature of shape, from the study of their rigid structures on the one hand, to the study of their flexible deformations on the other. His research in this area explores the geometry and topology of low-dimensional manifolds, particularly on spaces with hyperbolic geometry or negative curvature. He has made significant contributions in this domain, especially regarding the theory of Kleinian groups, hyperbolic 3-manifolds, and various aspects of Teichmüller theory.
His early work on the geometric limits of Kleinian groups enriched understandings of the range of geometric phenomena that can occur in hyperbolic geometry. His collaborative work on Thurston’s Ending Lamination Conjecture solved one of the foundational problems in the field and introduced techniques that have applications across mathematics. These findings led to many new questions about the interrelations of topological parameters and the geometries they predict, motivating Brock’s current work in this area. Brock is widely recognized as one of a small cohort of leaders in low dimensional geometric topology, and most areas of modern geometric topology have been influenced by his theorems and advances. His publications have appeared in Geometry & Topology, Annals of Math, Journal of Topological Analysis, and other top publications in the field.
Brock’s research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. His work has been widely celebrated: he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2017, and he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Simons Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a keynote speaker at many prominent international conferences, providing mini-courses to graduate students and early career researchers. He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Topology and has also served on the American Mathematical Society Committee on Science Policy.
After his arrival at Yale, Brock assumed leadership of the Summer Undergraduate Mathematics Research at Yale (SUMRY) program, which provides undergraduate students from Yale and other institutions opportunities to work over the summer with Yale faculty on collaborative research projects in pure and applied mathematics. With his co-director, he has brought National Science Foundation funding to support this popular program, which has resulted in numerous published papers from student research.
Brock received his B.A. at Yale and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.
