Selman Akbulut (born 1949) is a Turkish mathematician, specializing in research in topology, and geometry. He was a professor at Michigan State University until February 2020.

Career

In 1975, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley as a student of Robion Kirby. In topology, he has worked on handlebody theory, low-dimensional manifolds, symplectic topology, G2 manifolds. In the topology of real-algebraic sets, he and Henry C. King proved that every compact piecewise-linear manifold is a real-algebraic set; they discovered new topological invariants of real-algebraic sets. He was a visiting scholar several times at the Institute for Advanced Study (in 1975-76, 1980–81, 2002, and 2005). On February 14, 2020, Akbulut was removed from his tenured position at MSU by the Board of Trustees, after disputes over his teaching allotments and communications with colleagues.

Contributions

He has developed 4-dimensional handlebody techniques, settling conjectures and solving problems about 4-manifolds, such as a conjecture of Christopher Zeeman, the Harer–Kas–Kirby conjecture, a problem of Martin Scharlemann, and problems of Sylvain Cappell and Julius Shaneson. He constructed an exotic compact 4-manifold (with boundary) from which he discovered "Akbulut corks". His most recent results concern the 4-dimensional smooth Poincaré conjecture. He has supervised 14 Ph.D students as of 2019. He has more than 100 papers and three books published, and several books edited.