- Sylvain Cappell
Infobox Person
name = Sylvain Cappell
image_size = 150px
caption = Sylvain Cappell
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birth_date = 1947
birth_place =Belgium
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education =Princeton University
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occupation =mathematician
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website = http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/cappell/
footnotes =Sylvain Cappell, Belgian-born American mathematician (born 1947), a former student of William Browder at
Princeton University , is a topologist who has spent most of his career at theCourant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.He is best known for his "codimension one splitting theorem" [Sylvain Cappell, A splitting theorem for manifolds, Inventiones Mathematicae, 33 (1975) pp 69-170] , which is a standard tool in high dimensional
geometric topology , and a number of important results proven with his collaboratorJulius Shaneson (now at the University of Pennsylvania). Their work includes many results inknot theory (and broad generalizations of that subject) [Sylvain Cappell and Julius Shaneson, The codimension two placement problem and homology equivalent manifolds, Annals of Math. 99 (1974) 277-348.] and aspects oflow-dimensional topology . They gave the first nontrivial examples of topological conjugacy of linear transformations [Sylvain Cappell and Julius Shaneson, Nonlinear Similarity, Annals of Math. 113 (1981) 315-355] , which led to a flowering of research on the topological study of spaces with singularities [Shmuel Weinberger , The Topological Classification of Stratified Spaces, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994] .More recently, they combined their understanding of singularities, first to lattice point counting in polytopes, then to Euler-Maclaurin type summation formulae [Julius Shaneson, Characteristic classes, lattice points, and Euler-MacLaurin formulae, Proc. International Congress of Mathematicians, vol 1 (Zurich 1994) 1995 Birkhauser, Basel, Berlin, 612-624] , and most recently to counting lattice points in the circle [Sylvain Cappell and Julius Shaneson, Some problems in number theory I: The Circle Problem, http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0702.5613] . This last problem is a classical one, initiated by Gauss and the paper is still being vetted by experts.
Awards
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Guggenheim Fellowship (1989-90)
*Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1971-72)References
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