About Me

For 2023-2024, I am an Instructor at Lawrence University.

I was at the University of Georgia through the spring of 2022. Previously I was at Vanderbilt University from 2017, and an FWF Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Analysis and Number Theory at Graz University of Technology from 2014. I was also a visitor at the ESI at the University of Vienna and 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.

Recently, I have been 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 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:

• Packing problems are in the news! Viazovska is awarded the Fields Medal for her solution to the 8 dimensional sphere packing problem. See also her work on t-designs….

• Pentagons appear in Die Presse.

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.

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