Ronald Fintushel

Ronald Alan Fintushel is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional geometric topology and the mathematics of gauge theory.

Education and career

Fintushel studied mathematics at Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1967 and at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a master's degree in 1969. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton with thesis Orbit maps of local -actions on manifolds of dimension less than five under the supervision of Louis McAuley. Fintushel was a professor at Tulane University and is a professor at Michigan State University.
His research deals with geometric topology, in particular of 4-manifolds with links to gauge theory, knot theory, and symplectic geometry. He works closely with Ronald J. Stern.
In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker, with Ronald J. Stern, with talk Construction of smooth 4-manifolds at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. In 1997 Fintushel received the Distinguished Faculty Award from Michigan State University. In 2016 a conference was held in his honor at Tulane University.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Fintushel is a member of the editorial boards of Geometry & Topology and the Michigan Mathematical Journal.

Selected publications

with Stern: Constructing lens spaces by surgery on knots, Mathematische Zeitschrift, vol. 175, 1980, pp. 33–51
with Stern: An exotic free involution of , Annals of Mathematics, vol. 113, 1981, pp. 357–365
with Stern:, Annals of Mathematics, vol. 122, 1985, pp. 335–364
with Stern:, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 61, 1990, pp. 109–137
with Stern: Immersed spheres in 4-manifolds and the immersed Thom conjecture, Turkish Journal of Mathematics, vol. 19, 1995, pp. 145–157
with Stern: Donaldson invariants of 4-manifolds with simple type, J. Diff. Geom., vol. 42, 1995, pp. 577–633
with Stern: The blowup formula for Donaldson invariants, Annals of Mathematics, vol. 143, 1996, pp. 529–546
with Stern: Rational blowdowns of smooth 4-manifolds, Journal of Differential Geometry, vol. 46, 1997, pp. 181–235
with Stern: Surfaces in 4-manifolds, Math. Res. Letters, vol. 4, 1997, pp. 907–914
with Stern: Knots, links, and 4-manifolds, Inventiones mathematicae, vol. 134, 1998, pp. 363–400,
with Stern: Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. II. Doc. Math. 1998, Extra Vol. II, 443–452
with Stern: Symplectic surfaces in a fixed homology class, J. Diff. Geom., vol. 52, 2000, pp. 203–222
with Stern: Families of simply connected 4-manifolds with the same Seiberg-Witten invariants, Topology, vol. 43, 2004, pp. 1449–1467
with Stern: Invariants for Lagrangian tori, Geom. Topol., vol. 8, 2004, pp., 947-968
with Stern:, Geometry and Topology Monographs, vol. 7, 2004, Proceedings of the Casson Fest, pp. 311–333
with Stern, B. D. Park: Reverse engineering small 4-manifolds, Algebraic & Geometric Topology, vol. 7, 2007, pp. 2103–2116
with Stern: Six Lectures on Four 4-manifolds, Low dimensional topology, IAS/Park City Math. Ser. 15, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2009, pp. 265–315