Ian Agol

Who is Ian Agol?

Ian Agol is an American mathematician who deals primarily with the topology of three-dimensional manifolds.

Agol obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of California, San Diego with Michael Freedman. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ian Agol, Danny Calegari and David Gabai received the 2009 Clay Research Award for the proof of the Marden tameness conjecture, a conjecture of Albert Marden. It states that a hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely generated fundamental group is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact 3-manifold. The conjecture was proven in 2004 by Agol, and independently by Calegari with Gabai, and implies the Ahlfors measure conjecture.

In 2005 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

In 2012 he announced a proof of the virtually Haken conjecture. It states that every aspherical 3-manifold is finitely covered by a Haken manifold.

In 2013, Agol was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, along with Daniel Wise.

His twin brother, Eric Agol, is an astronomy professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.