About Me

For 2023-2026, I am at Lawrence University.

Previously: I was at the University of Georgia through the spring of 2022; at Vanderbilt University as part of their Center for Constructive Approximation and the Data Science Institute. from 2017; and an FWF Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Analysis and Number Theory at Graz University of Technology from 2014. I have also been a visitor at the ESI at the University of Vienna; ICERM at Brown University, and a summer researcher at MSRI and the Aspen Center for Physics. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, I was a remote visitor at the Fields Institute in 2021 and the ESI in 2022.

I studied at Haverford College and the University of Pittsburgh.

Over the years, my research has been partially supported by some these institutions, the FWF, and the NSF in a variety of forms.

After graduate school, I ended studying and teaching a great deal of probability and statistics.
If you want some reasons why a mathematician should do that, I refer you to Mumford’s “The Dawning of the Age of Stochasticity”.

I am interested in problems of discrete geometry and geometric optimization that are approachable by synthetic or analytic means and those where brute force computation is becoming tractable.

Right now I am (still) thinking about:

  • Critical density in packings of anisotropic objects
  • The quality of point sets on the sphere
  • Configuration spaces of hard disks
  • Hyperuniform structures in the compact setting
  • Topologically sweeping rope

I am also interested in building physical models of some of these things.

Snow from yesterday:

Other information may be found in my CV (~2023) or my short Research Statement (~2020).

For search purposes it may be helpful to consider my name as Woden Kusner or Woeden Kusner.

A template for this site and instructions can be found here.

Teaching

This fall I will be teaching MATH 103 (F25). Next year I will be teaching MATH 102 (W26) and MATH 140 (S26).

Research

My research papers by type: journal papers; preprints.

Journal Papers

A Gordian Pair of Links
Geometriae Dedicata
, 2023.
  • Rob Kusner
  • Wöden Kusner
Hyperuniform point sets on the sphere: probabilistic aspects
Monatshefte für Mathematik
, 2020.
  • Johann Brauchart
  • Peter Grabner
  • Wöden Kusner
  • Jonas Ziefle
Hyperuniform point sets on the sphere: deterministic aspects
Constructive Approximation
, 2019.
  • Johann Brauchart
  • Peter Grabner
  • Wöden Kusner
The twelve spheres problem
Bolyai Society Mathematical Studies
, 2018.
  • Rob Kusner
  • Wöden Kusner
  • Jeffrey Lagarias
  • Senya Shlosman
The local optimality of the double lattice packing
Discrete & Computational Geometry
, 2016.
  • Yoav Kallus
  • Wöden Kusner
On the densest packing of polycylinders in any dimension
Discrete & Computational Geometry
, 2016.
  • Wöden Kusner
Upper bounds on packing density for circular cylinders with high aspect ratio
Discrete & Computational Geometry
, 2014.
  • Wöden Kusner

Preprints

Chirality for crooked curves
Preprint
, 2020.
  • Giovanni Dietler
  • Rob Kusner
  • Wöden Kusner
  • Eric Rawdon
  • Piotr Szymczak
A perfect stopper
Preprint
, 2018.
  • Greg Buck
  • Rob Kusner
  • Wöden Kusner
Packings of regular pentagons in the plane
Preprint
, 2016.
  • Thomas Hales
  • Wöden Kusner