Rate My Professor Marc Culler

Marc Culler is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests encompass group theory, low-dimensional topology, 3-manifolds, hyperbolic geometry, and computation in geometry and topology. Culler earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1973, an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978.

Culler's career includes serving as G.C. Evans Instructor at Rice University from 1979 to 1982 and Assistant Professor at Rutgers University from 1982 to 1986. He joined the University of Illinois at Chicago as Associate Professor in 1986, was promoted to Full Professor in 1993, and became Professor Emeritus in 2015. Key publications include "Varieties of group representations and splittings of 3-manifolds" with Peter B. Shalen (1983), "Dehn surgery on knots" with John Luecke and Peter B. Shalen (1987), "Moduli of graphs and automorphisms of free groups" with Karen Vogtmann (1986), "Group actions on R-trees" with John W. Morgan (1987), "SnapPy, a computer program for studying the geometry and topology of 3-manifolds" (2017), "Margulis numbers for Haken manifolds" with Peter B. Shalen (2012), and "Volume and homology of one-cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds" with Peter B. Shalen (2008). He received the Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015, UIC University Scholar award from 2010 to 2013, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship from 1986 to 1988, and fellowships at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 1989 and 1994, as well as membership at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1986 to 1987. Culler also contributed editorially as Topology Editor for the New York Journal of Mathematics from 1997 to 2013 and Editor for the Electronic Research Announcements in Mathematical Sciences from 2012 to 2014.