UCLA Topology Group

Topological research at UCLA began with the arrival of Robert Sorgenfrey in 1942. High points in the research accomplishments of topologists at UCLA include the solution by Robion Kirby, who was at UCLA from 1965 to 1971, (with Laurence Siebenmann) of four of the seven problems listed by John Milnor in 1963 as the most important in topology at that time. Kirby first presented his famous torus trick, the key to the solutions, in a UCLA seminar in the summer of 1968. Another of the Milnor problems, the Double Suspension Conjecture was solved by Robert Edwards, who came to UCLA in 1970 and remained here until his retirement in 2006. The accomplishments of Allan Hatcher, who was at UCLA from 1976 until 1984, include the proof of the Smale Conjecture (published in 1983).

Faculty Ko Honda Sucharit Sarkar Zhouli Xu Emeritus Robert Edwards Faculty in related fields Paul Balmer Pavel Galashin Joaquin Moraga Igor Pak Peter Petersen Mason Porter Raphael Rouquier Burt Totaro

Postdocs Vijay Higgins Sihao Ma Ziwen Zhao

Graduate students Thomas Rush Brown Runji Li Roman Krutowski Harahm Park David Popovic Victoria Quijano Advika Rajapakse Jason Schuchardt Benjamin Slater Jung Joo Suh Yan Tao Adam Zheleznyak

There is a Google group mailing list that announces topology seminars occuring in UCLA; to be included in the mailing list, apply through the Google group webpage, or contact Ko Honda or Sucharit Sarkar. The following seminars occur in or around UCLA.

• UCLA Topology Seminar
• Joint UCLA / USC / Caltech Topology Seminar
• USC Geometry, Topology, and Categorification Seminar
• Caltech Geometry and Topology Seminar

Some of these events are recorded on the following two Google calendars, which you may add to your own calendar using these ICAL links: Topology Seminar, Joint Topology Seminar; see for instance this how-to.

Here is a list of some recent topology workshops (co-)organized by UCLA topologists.

• Geometry and Topology in Low Dimensions: Lasting Trends and Emerging Directions (June 2026)
• Computations in stable homotopy theory (October 2025)
• ICMS Workshop: Young Homotopy Theorist Meeting (October 2025)
• Workshop on Theory and Computation in Mathematical Physics and Topology (September 2025)
• AMS Sectional Meeting Special Session on Chromatic Homotopy Theory (August 2025)
• International Workshop on Algebraic Topology (July 2025)
• Summer School on Computations with the Adams Spectral Sequence and the Last Kervaire Invariant Problem (July 2025)
• Workshop on Stable Homotopy Theory (March 2025)
• IWoAT Special Conference in Honor of Peter May (March 2025)
• Higher Dimensional Contact Topology (April 2024)
• Geometry and Topology Workshop (January 2024)
• Floer Homotopical Methods in Low Dimensional and Symplectic Topology (November 2022)
• Spectral Methods in Algebra, Geometry, and Topology (September 2022 - December 2022)
• Equivariant Techniques in Stable Homotopy (May 2021 / September 2022)
• Equivariant Stable Homotopy and p-adic Hodge Theory (March 2020)
• Geometry and Topology Workshop (January 2020)
• Floer Homotopy Theory and Low-dimensional Topology Workshop (August 2019)
• Workshop on Homotopy Theory (August 2019)
• QFT and Manifold Invariants (July 2019)
• Hidden Algebraic Structures in Topology (March 2019).
• Symplectic Geometry and Homotopy Theory Workshop (December 2018)
• Chromatic Homotopy Theory, Journey to the Frontier (May 2018)
• Low-dimensional Topology Workshop (January 2018)
• Winter School in Algebraic Topology (October 2017)
• Floer Homology and Homotopy Theory Workshop (July 2017)
• Gauge Theory and Categorification (March 2017)