Prof. Paul Seidel

Professor Seidel is a leading figure in symplectic geometry, an increasingly central field in mathematics with links to theoreticla physic, analysis and low-dimensional topology.

He has done major work on the border of symplectic and algebraic geometry. His work is distinguished by an understanding of very abstract algebraic constructs (such as derived twisted categories) in sufficiently concrete terms to derive results about the analytic/geometric objects at the basis of symplectic geometry. In this way Seidel has made substantial advances towards proving Maxim Kontsevich’s homological mirror symmetry conjecture, actually proving the conjecture in several special cases. Jointly with Ivan Smith, Seidel constructed the first deformationally non-standard examples of Stein complex structures on a Euclidean space. With his former student Mohammed Abouzaid, he has developed this into a powerful technique to construct infinitely many examples of non-symplectomorphic Stein structures on a any smooth manifold of dimension greater than four.