Yair Minsky

Yair Nathan Minsky (born in 1962) is an Israeli-American mathematician whose research concerns three-dimensional topology, differential geometry, group theory and holomorphic dynamics. He is a professor at Yale University.^[1] He is known for having proved Thurston's ending lamination conjecture and as a student of curve complex geometry.

Minsky obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 under the supervision of William Paul Thurston, with the thesis Harmonic Maps and Hyperbolic Geometry.^[2]

His Ph.D. students include Jason Behrstock, Erica Klarreich, Hossein Namazi and Kasra Rafi.^[2]

He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1995.^[3][4]

He was a speaker at the ICM (Madrid) 2006.

He was named to the 2021 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to hyperbolic 3-manifolds, low-dimensional topology, geometric group theory and Teichmuller theory".^[5] He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.^[6]

• Coxeter lectures (Fields Institute) 2006
• Mallat Lectures (Technion) 2008

• with Howard Masur: "Geometry of the complex of curves I: Hyperbolicity", Inventiones mathematicae, 138 (1), 103–149.
• with Howard Masur: "Geometry of the complex of curves II: Hierarchical structure", Geometric and Functional Analysis, 10 (4), 902–974.
• "The classification of Kleinian surface groups, I: Models and bounds", Annals of Mathematics, 171 (2010), 1–107.
• with Jeffrey Brock, and Richard Canary: "The classification of Kleinian surface groups, II: The ending lamination conjecture", Annals of Mathematics, 176 (2012), 1–149.
• with Jason Behrstock: "Dimension and rank for mapping class groups", Annals of Mathematics (2) 167 (2008), no. 3, 1055–1077.
• "The classification of punctured-torus groups", Annals of Mathematics, 149 (1999), 559–626.
• "On rigidity, limit sets, and end invariants of hyperbolic 3-manifolds", Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 7 (3), 539–588.

• Ending lamination theorem
• Curve complex

• "When Thurston proposed it, the virtual Haken conjecture seemed like a small question, but it hung on stubbornly, shining a spotlight on how little we knew about the field."^[7]

• Minsky's home page at Yale University
• Minsky's profile at Google Scholar