Guofang Wei

Who is Guofang Wei?

Guofang Wei is a mathematician in the field of differential geometry. She is a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Wei earned a doctorate in mathematics from SUNY Stony Brook when she was only 24 years old. Her advisor was Detlef Gromoll. Her dissertation produced fundamental new examples of manifolds with positive Ricci curvature and was published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. These examples were later expanded upon by Burkard Wilking.

In addition to her work on the topology of manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature, she has completed work on the isometry groups of manifolds with negative Ricci curvature with coauthors Xianzhe Dai and Zhongmin Shen. She also has major work with Peter Petersen on manifolds with integral Ricci curvature bounds.

Starting in 2000 Wei began working with Christina Sormani on limits of manifolds with lower Ricci curvature bounds using techniques of Jeff Cheeger and Tobias Colding, particularly Kenji Fukaya's metric measure convergence. The limit spaces in this setting are metric measure spaces. Wei was invited to present this work in a series of talks at the Seminaire Borel in Switzerland. Sormani and Wei also developed a notion called the covering spectrum of a Riemannian manifold. Dr. Wei has completed research with her student, Will Wylie, on smooth metric measure spaces and the Bakry-Emery Ricci tensor.