Quick Facts
Biography
Selman Akbulut (born 1949) is a Turkish mathematician and a Professor at Michigan State University. His research is in topology.
Career
In 1975 he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley as a student of Robion Kirby. In topology, he has worked on handlebody theory, low-dimensional manifolds, symplectic topology, G2 manifolds. In the topology of real-algebraic sets, he and Henry C. King proved that every compact piecewise-linear manifold is a real-algebraic set; they discovered new topological invariants of real-algebraic sets.
He has developed 4-dimensional handlebody techniques, settling conjectures and solving problems about 4-manifolds, such as Zeeman conjecture, Harer-Kas-Kirby conjecture, Scharlemann problem, and Cappell-Shaneson problems. He constructed an exotic compact 4-manifold (with boundary) from which he discovered "Akbulut corks".
His most recent results concern the 4-dimensional smooth Poincare conjecture. He has supervised 12 Ph.D students as of 2016. He has more than 95 papers and three books published, and several books edited.
He was a visiting scholar several times at the Institute for Advanced Study (in 1975-76, 1980–81, 2002, and 2005).