Amit Patel, an associate professor in the Colorado State University Department of Mathematics, has been named a Leverhulme Visiting Professor. This prestigious title comes from the Leverhulme Trust, a national grant-making organization in the United Kingdom that uses its resources to support scholarships for research and education.
With visiting professorships, UK institutions invite an eminent researcher to enhance the skills and knowledge of the students and academic staff, according to the Leverhulme Trust.
“Amit is at the forefront of essential mathematical discoveries,” said Jan Nerger, dean of the College of Natural Sciences. “This is a well-deserved honor, and the students at Queen Mary University of London will benefit greatly.”
Patel focuses on pure and applied algebraic topology, and his research focuses on developing foundations for persistent homology and related ideas.
Topology is a field of mathematics that studies the properties of a shape that continuously undergoes deformations such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending without tearing the shape.
Homology is a subfield that defines and studies holes in a space, and it is useful in data science. Patel’s theory of Generalized Persistent Diagrams helped solve many of the long-standing open problems in the field of persistent homology, and it aided him in earning this fellowship.
“His experience and leadership in this area as well as running educational seminars make Prof. Patel an ideal choice for this project – to achieve both the research objectives and the knowledge transfer to Queen Mary University of London and the broader UK applied topology community,” wrote Primoz Skraba, a senior lecturer of applied and computational topology in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London, who encouraged Patel to apply for this fellowship and wrote his recommendation letter.
This fellowship helps fund Patel’s research sabbatical for a year at Queen Mary University, where he will complete a project that is many years in the making. The project will introduce a complete theory of persistent homology for stratified maps.
Patel also looks forward to learning about the latest results in stochastic topology from leading experts in the UK. In addition, Patel will fulfill his fellowship requirement to present a lecture series about his work.
“This fellowship is a recognition of my accomplishments, and a green light to keep doing what I am doing,” Patel said.
