Ciprian Manolescu

Ciprian Manolescu (born December 24, 1978) is a Romanian-American mathematician, working in gauge theory, symplectic geometry, and low-dimensional topology. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Manolescu completed his first eight classes at School no. 11 Mihai Eminescu and his secondary education at Ion Brătianu High School in Piteşti. He did his undergrad and Ph.D. at Harvard University under the direction of Peter B. Kronheimer. He was the winner of the Morgan Prize, awarded jointly by AMS-MAA-SIAM, in 2002. His undergraduate thesis was on Finite dimensional approximation in Seiberg–Witten theory, and his Ph.D. thesis topic was A spectrum valued TQFT from the Seiberg–Witten equations.

In early 2013 he released a paper detailing a disproof of the triangulation conjecture for manifolds of dimension 5 and higher. For this paper he received the E. H. Moore Prize from the American Mathematical Society.

He was among the recipients of the Clay Research Fellowship (2004–2008).

In 2012 he was awarded one of the ten prizes of the European Mathematical Society for his work on low-dimensional topology, and particularly for his role in the development of combinatorial Heegaard Floer homology.

He was elected as a member of the 2017 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to Floer homology and the topology of manifolds".

In 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro.

He has one of the best records ever in mathematical competitions:

• He holds the sole distinction of writing three perfect papers at the International Mathematical Olympiad: Toronto, Canada (1995); Bombay, India (1996); Mar del Plata, Argentina (1997).
• He placed in the top 5 on the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates in 1997, 1998, and 2000.

• Manolescu, Ciprian (2016). "Pin(2)-equivariant Seiberg–Witten Floer homology and the Triangulation Conjecture". J. Amer. Math. Soc. 29: 147–176. arXiv:1303.2354. doi:10.1090/jams829.
• Manolescu, Ciprian; Ozsváth, Peter; Sarkar, Sucharit (2009). "A Combinatorial Description of Knot Floer Homology". Annals of Mathematics. Second Series. 169 (2): 633–660. arXiv:math/0607691. doi:10.4007/annals.2009.169.633.
• Lipshitz, Robert; Manolescu, Ciprian; Wang, Jiajun (2008). "Combinatorial cobordism maps in hat Heegaard Floer theory". Duke Math. J. 145 (2): 207–247. arXiv:math/0611927. doi:10.1215/00127094-2008-050.