Robert Ernest Gompf (born 1957) is an American mathematician specializing in geometric topology.
Gompf received a Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Robion Kirby (An invariant for Casson handles, disks and knot concordants).[1] He is now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
His research concerns the topology of 4-manifolds. In 1990, he demonstrated with Tomasz Mrowka that there is a simply connected irreducible 4-manifold that admits no complex structures. In 1995, he constructed new examples of simply connected compact symplectic 4-manifolds that are not homeomorphic or diffeomorphic to complex manifolds (Kähler manifolds).
He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[2] He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994 in Zurich (Smooth four-manifolds and symplectic topology).