Academic Background

Bridson was an undergraduate at Hertford College (BA 1986) and did his graduate work at Cornell University in New York (MS 1988, PhD 1991). He was subsequently an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a Tutorial Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. He twice spent a year at the University of Geneva as a Visiting Professor. Until 2001 he held the title Professor of Topology in Oxford. He left for a Chair in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London, returning in 2007 as the first Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics. His honours include the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (1999), the Forder Lectureship of the New Zealand Mathematical Society (2005), and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006). In 2006 he was an Invited Speaker at the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians. He currently holds an EPSRC Senior Fellowship.

Research Interests

Professor Bridson's research interests lie at the interface of geometry, topology, and group theory. Diverse encapsulations of symmetry, quantifications of complexity, and notions of curvature provide unifying themes for much of his work.

Selected Publications

"Metric spaces of non-positive curvature" (with A. Haefliger), Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften, Vol. 319, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1999.

"Grothendieck's problems concerning profinite completions and representations of groups" (with F. Grunewald), Annals of Math., 160 (2004), 359--373.

"Non-positive curvature and complexity for finitely presented groups", International Congress of Mathematicians. Vol. II, 961--987, Eur. Math. Soc., Zurich 2006.

"Fractional isoperimetric inequalities and subgroup distortion", J. Amer. Math. Soc. 12 (1999), no. 4, 1103--1118.

"Formal language theory and the geometry of 3-manifolds" (with R. Gilman), Comm. Math. Helv. 71 (1996), 525--555.

"The symmetries of outer space" (with K. Vogtmann), Duke Math. J. 106 (2001), 391--409.

"Subgroups of direct products of limit groups" (with J. Howie, C.F. Miller III, H. Short), Annals of Math., in press.

"The quadratic isoperimetric inequality for mapping tori of free-group automorphisms" (with Daniel Groves), Memoirs Amer. Math. Soc., in press.

"Geometric and Combinatorial Group Theory", Chap. IV.10, Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Princeton Univ. Press, 2008.