Mark Powell

Photo of me Mail: School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, University Place, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, United Kingdom.

email: mark.powell@glasgow.ac.uk

I am a Professor at the University of Glasgow. I graduated in 2011 from the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Professor Andrew Ranicki, and I was a Zorn Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University in Bloomington from 2011 - 2014. From 2014 to 2017 I was an assistant professor in the CIRGET lab at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). I was at Durham University from 2017 - 2022. For the academic years 2014 - 2015 and 2020 - 2021 I visited the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

I work on topology, specifically the theory of manifolds. Recently, I have been specialising in the topology of 4-dimensional manifolds and related topics.

Students

Simeon Hellsten, 2024-8.

Mark Pencovitch, 2023-7. Here are his papers and preprints.

Daniel Galvin, 2020-4. Here is his PhD Thesis. Here are his papers and preprints.

Scott Stirling, 2018-22. Here is his PhD Thesis. Here is his preprint.

Oliver Singh, 2017-22, joint with Andrew Lobb. Here is his PhD Thesis. Here are his preprints.

Lucia Karageorghis wrote this article in summer 2020, funded by an LMS undergraduate research bursary.

Current and former postdocs

John Nicholson Rankin-Sneddon Research Fellow at University of Glasgow, 2023-6.

Csaba Nagy EPSRC funded postdoctoral fellow at University of Glasgow, 2021-4.

Michelle Daher EPSRC funded postdoctoral fellow at University of Glasgow, 2021-4.

Anthony Conway Swiss national science foundation postdoctoral fellow at Durham University, 2018-9.

Patrick Orson CIRGET postdoctoral fellow 2017.

Matthias Nagel CIRGET postdoctoral fellow 2015 - 2017.

Ying Hu CIRGET postdoctoral fellow 2015 - 2017.

Editing and books

Disc embedding theorem book.
Errata.
Quanta article.

I am the topology editor of the Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.

I was a guest editor of a special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A (Volume 154, Issue 6, December 2024), in honour of Andrew Ranicki.

Carmen Rovi and edited Celebratio Mathematica page on Andrew Ranicki.

I was an associate editor, with responsibility for Chapter 4, of K3: a new Kirby problem list, which will soon be published as a book by the AMS.

Papers and Preprints

Unpublished notes

Talks

Potential PhD projects

Teaching and seminars

Symmetries of 4-manifolds, Warsaw, Poland, Spring 2024.

Mapping class groups of 3-manifolds seminar, Glasgow, Autumn 2023.

Topological manifolds seminar, Bonn seminar course, Summer 2021.

Topological manifolds, Bonn graduate course, Winter 2020-1.

Algebraic Topology, Durham, 2019-2020.

Algebraic Topology II, UQAM Winter 2017.

The disc embedding theorem, Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics seminar, Autumn 2016.

Calcul des formes différentielles, UQAM Winter 2016.

Topology of manifolds, UQAM Winter 2016.

Heegaard-Floer homology, CIRGET low dimensional topology learning seminar, Autumn 2015.

Courbes Algébriques, UQAM Autumn 2015.

Introduction to differentiable geometry, IU Spring 2014.