Thomas A. Garrity

Thomas Anthony Garrity (born 25 April 1959)^[1] is an American mathematician. He teaches at Williams College, where he is the Webster Atwell Class of 1921 Professor of Mathematics.^[2]

Thomas A. Garrity
Born	(1959-04-25) April 25, 1959 (age 66)
Academic background
Education	University of Texas at Austin Brown University
Thesis	On Ample Vector Bundles and Negative Curvature (1986)
Doctoral advisor	William Fulton

Early life and education

Thomas Anthony Garrity was born in 1959.^[1] He completed his bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981.^[2] He attended Brown University for doctoral studies, completing a PhD in mathematics in 1986 under the supervision of professor William Fulton. Garrity's doctoral thesis was titled On Ample Vector Bundles and Negative Curvature.^[3]

Career

Garrity is currently a professor of mathematics at Williams College, where he has taught since 1989.^[4]

Research

In 1989, Garrity and three other collaborators found an algorithm in NC to factorize rational polynomials over the complex numbers.^[5]

In 1991, Garrity discovered the concept of "geometric continuity", which generalizes several other notions of continuity for both explicit and implicit surfaces.^[6]

In 1999, Garrity came up with the concept of a simplex sequence, which is an alternate approach to the Hermite problem (of which the Jacobi-Perron algorithm is yet another approach).^[7] For the case of ordered pairs, if the simplex sequence is eventually periodic, then the two numbers must be of degree at most three.^[7]

Recognition

Garrity was a 2004 recipient of one of the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.^[8]

Bibliography

His books include:

• Garrity, Thomas A. (2015). Electricity and Magnetism for Mathematicians: A Guided Path from Maxwell's Equations to Yang-Mills. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107078208.
• Garrity, Thomas A. (2013). Algebraic Geometry: A Problem-Solving Approach. American Mathematical Society. ISBN 9780821893968.
• Garrity, Thomas A. (2004). All the Mathematics You Missed. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9787302090854.
• Adams, Colin; Garrity, Thomas A. (2009). The United States of Mathematics Presidential Debate (DVD). ISBN 978-0-88385-910-0.