Benjamin G. Thompson

Hello! I am a mathematics PhD candidate at Cornell University, advised by Martin Kassabov. I'm currently on sabbatical in Australia.

I study topology and am interested in exploring invariants of low-dimensional manifolds. In simple English, I create knowledge for the world by studying shapes from a precise, rigorous, and verifiable theoretical and abstract perspective.

I have been recently thinking about ribbon categories and character varieties. I previously co-ran a graduate student seminar exploring Morse theory. Outside of pure mathematics, I am also interested in new systems-level programming languages (mainly Zig and Odin), and making puzzle games — you can find a couple of mine here.

Prior to Cornell, I graduated from the research-intensive Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) at the Australian National University (ANU) with first-class honours. My thesis investigated the Khovanov homology of rational tangles; you can find a 20-page paper based on it here.

You can find me on Github at bg-thompson and on the Mastodon server mathstodon.xyz at bgthompson. My email address is XYZ37@cornell.edu, where XYZ are the initials of my name (the same initials used in the domain name of this website). I created almost all of this website myself using the text editors Emacs and Sublime Text.