Chris Wendl

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the geometry and topology group in the mathematics department at University College London.

Short Vita

mailing address:
Chris Wendl
Department of Mathematics
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

office:
25 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AY
Room 802a
phone: +44 (0)20 7679 2272
fax: +44 (0)20 7383 5519 (this is the UCL maths departmental fax number)

e-mail:  c dot wendl at ucl dot ac dot uk

Research

My research is in symplectic and contact topology, particularly the theory of pseudoholomorphic curves, applications to contact manifolds, and Symplectic Field Theory.

New 16/4/2013: we have a 2-year postdoc position in symplectic/contact topology available at UCL, starting Autumn 2013. The application deadline is 26 May, 2013.

My publications.

I am an editorial advisor for the Proceedings / Journal / Bulletin of the LMS, in the area of symplectic and contact topology.

For the Spring term 2013, I am organising a learning seminar on the h-principle. Please contact me if you're interested in participating.

Interesting seminars in the area:

Upcoming conferences of interest (listed here partly just to remind myself where I'm planning to travel and when):

And some conferences in the recent past.

PhD students:

  • Alexandru Cioba (began October 2012)
  • Marcelo Alves (began 2011; supervised jointly with Frédéric Bourgeois in Brussels)
UCL's website contains plenty of information about our mathematics PhD programme. Application deadlines are around the end of January. If you're interested in applying and want to name me as a potential supervisor, you should contact me and discuss this in advance.

My collaborators, present and past:

Some other people I've worked with in the past:

In the Summer semester 2010 I organized the Leipzig/Berlin Symplectic Homology Learning Seminar.

Some information about funding opportunities, events, and job postings in my field can be found on the website of Contact And Symplectic Topology (CAST), a Research Networking Programme (RNP) of the European Science Foundation (ESF).


This is me, wielding my trusty water bottle to protect Imperial China from Mongol invasion.


This is not me (in case that was unclear). This is János, with his foot resting on Evans, Partial Differential Equations, AMS 1991.
(Full disclosure: János used to be my cat, but has actually been someone else's cat since I moved to Europe in 2007. Nonetheless, I am sure he remains as fond of PDE books as he always was.)

Teaching

Undergraduate

For the Autumn 2012 term I am teaching MATH1101 (Analysis 1). Here is a link to the moodle for the course. (If you are not enrolled in the course you will need an "enrolment key" to access the moodle.)

Postgraduate

In October 2012 I gave a minicourse for Master's students on "Pseudo-holomorphic curves in Symplectic and Contact Topology" at IRMA Strasbourg. An unexpectedly large set of lecture notes on rational/ruled symplectic 4-manifolds and related things was produced as a result. It is likely that they will eventually be merged with my other lecture notes on holomorphic curves (still in progress).

Here is some information on courses I've taught in the past.

Some mathematical links


(Some unusual grafitti I found on a bathroom wall at the Diesel Cafe in Somerville, Massachusetts. March 13, 2007.)

A Frequently Asked Question

Question: Aren't you German?

Answer: No. Don't let my name or my history of working at German speaking universities or the blond hair and blue eyes or the fact that you've overheard me speaking German with my colleagues fool you. I am, in fact, not German.

An Occasionally Asked Question

Question: Where did you learn to speak English so well?

Answer: It's my native language.

A Question That Is Asked Far More Often Than It Should Be

Question: Where did you learn to speak German so well?

Answer: I don't speak German that well, it only sounds like it if you don't listen carefully.

Towers of Light (as seen from the Staten Island Ferry, 9/11/04; photo by MPW)

9/11 happened approximately midway through my graduate career in New York; about two months before my oral exams. I've been meaning for years to write a rambling but potent essay on this topic, and post it on the web. I even started one on the evening of 9/11/03, but it proved rather more rambling than potent and I abandoned the effort. It will probably never actually happen.

American news and politics

The following list of links should probably be revised at some point... in any case it reflects the fact that the five years of my Ph.D. happened to be more or less the same years that the political situation in my homeland started to go seriously downhill, and thus my default procrastination activity became looking at the online front pages of the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

Some of the organizations linked below could be characterized as, "not always the left's best representatives, but doing more good than harm."

And here are some other sources for news and related stuff.

Other nonmathematical things

This page is permanently under construction. The sort of occasional construction that one might associate with a lackluster economy. Have a nice day.