Bernard Maskit

Bernard Maskit
NationalityAmerican
EducationNew York University (PhD)
OccupationMathematician
Known forExpertise in Kleinian groups

Bernard (Bernie) Maskit (born 27 May 1935, died 15 March 2024) was an American mathematician who worked on Kleinian groups, low dimensional geometry and topology, and related topics.

Life and Work

Maskit studied for both his bachelors and doctoral degrees at New York University, earning his Ph.D. in 1964 under the supervision of Lipman Bers,[1]with a thesis entitled On Klein's Combination Theorem. After postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, he held an assistant professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1965 to 1972.[2] He then moved to the mathematics department at Stony Brook University, where he retired in 2008[3] and was then a professor emeritus until his death.[4] In 2012, he became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[5]

Maskit’s main area of mathematical expertise was the study of Kleinian groups acting on low dimensional hyperbolic spaces, where he made fundamental contributions. His works include the planarity theorem,  the significant development of the Klein-Maskit combination theorems, the study of Schottky groups including their characterization, and the Poincare polyhedron theorem. Of particular note is the Maskit slice of Teichmueller space. He is the author of the book Kleinian Groups (Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften 287, Springer-Verlag, 1988)[6][7] and gave an invited talk about Kleinian groups at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians.[8]

  1. ^ Bernard Maskit at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Past faculty, MIT Mathematics, retrieved 2015-01-22.
  3. ^ Member profile, Institute for Advanced Study, retrieved 2015-01-21.
  4. ^ Faculty web page, Stony Brook University, retrieved 2015-01-21.
  5. ^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2015-01-21.
  6. ^ Marden, Albert (1990), "Review: Bernard Maskit, Kleinian groups", Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 22 (2): 310–315, doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1990-15895-1
  7. ^ Review of Kleinian groups by William Abikoff (1990), MR0959135
  8. ^ Maskit, Bernard (1974), "Classification of Kleinian Groups" (PDF), Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vancouver, pp. 213–216, MR 0437749.