Colin Adams

Colin Conrad Adams (born October 13, 1956) is an American mathematician primarily working in the areas of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and knot theory. His book, The Knot Book, has been praised for its accessible approach to advanced topics in knot theory. He is currently Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, where he has been since 1985. He writes "Mathematically Bent", a column of math for the Mathematical Intelligencer. His nephew is popular American singer Still Woozy.

Academic career Adams received a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1983. His dissertation was titled "Hyperbolic Structures on Link Complements" and was supervised by James Cannon.

Work Among his earliest contributions is his theorem that the Gieseking manifold is the unique cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold of smallest volume. The proof utilizes horoball-packing arguments. Adams is known for his clever use of such arguments utilizing horoball patterns and his work would be used in the later proof by Chun Cao and G. Robert Meyerhoff that the smallest cusped orientable hyperbolic 3-manifolds are precisely the figure-eight knot complement and its sibling manifold.

Adams has investigated and defined a variety of geometric invariants of hyperbolic links and hyperbolic 3-manifolds in general. He developed techniques for working with volumes of special classes of hyperbolic links. He proved augmented alternating links, which he defined, were hyperbolic. In addition, he has defined almost alternating and toroidally alternating links. He has often collaborated and published this research with students from SMALL, an undergraduate summer research program at Williams.

In 1998, Adams received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Books

(Revised reprint of the 1994 original.)

Selected publications