Jeffrey Weeks (mathematician)

Jeffrey Renwick Weeks ( born December 10, 1956) is an American mathematician.

Weeks studied at Dartmouth College ( Bachelor 1978) and in 1985 received his doctorate from Princeton University with William Thurston ( Hyperbolic structures on three manifolds ).

Weeks was concerned with the geometry of low-dimensional manifolds and their applications in cosmology. He hopes to uncover evidence of the topology and geometry of the universe from the cosmic microwave data ( CMB). In a work of 2003 he favored here the (finite) dodecahedron of Henri Poincaré, to explain the lack of correlations for large angular distances in the CMB data. He also wrote programs for visualizing manifolds for educational purposes in schools, which was freely available, produced a film about computer - manifolds ( The shape of space) and wrote a popular book on geometry.

In 1999 he was MacArthur Fellow.

Writings

• The shape of space -how to visualize surfaces and three dimensional manifolds. 1995, 2nd edition, Marcel Dekker 2002
• Is space finite? . Scientific American, April 1999
• Measuring the shape of the universe. Notices AMS, November 1998 pdf