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Steven Sivek

Professor of Pure Mathematics, Imperial College London
Imperial College London · London, United Kingdom · academic
ma.imperial.ac.uk
Professor Of Pure Mathematics, Imperial College LondonUSA IOI 2001 Bronze Medalist2002 National Science Bowl ChampionPhD MIT 2011 (advisor Tomasz Mrowka)

Steven Sivek is a Professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London in the Geometry group, working in low-dimensional topology, gauge theory, knot theory, and contact and symplectic geometry. A Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology alum, he won a bronze medal for the United States at the 2001 International Olympiad in Informatics and was a 2002 National Science Bowl champion. He earned his PhD in mathematics at MIT (2011, advisor Tomasz Mrowka) and held postdoctoral positions at Harvard, Princeton, and Bonn before joining Imperial.

Steven Sivek is a Professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London, a member of the Geometry group working in low-dimensional topology, gauge theory, knot theory, and contact and symplectic geometry. He earned an S.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from MIT (2006) and a PhD in Mathematics from MIT (2011, advisor Tomasz Mrowka), then held postdoctoral and visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, the Simons Center, and the University of Bonn before joining Imperial in 2017, becoming Professor in the 2020s. He publishes prolifically, most often with John A. Baldwin, on instanton Floer homology, Dehn surgery, and knot detection. As a high-school student he won a bronze medal for the USA at the 2001 International Olympiad in Informatics and the 2002 National Science Bowl, and he contributed to SageMath as an undergraduate.

Details
LocationLondon, United Kingdom
Company siteimperial.ac.uk
UniversityMassachusetts Institute of Technology
low-dimensional topologygauge theoryknot theorycontact geometrysymplectic geometryHeegaard Floer homologymonopole homologyinstanton Floer homologySageMathcontact and symplectic geometryFloer homology
Notes
  • Promoted from Reader to full Professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London by 2026, with postdoctoral stops at Harvard (2011-2013), Princeton (2013-2016) and a visiting professorship at Bonn (2016-2017) — a rapid ascent anchored in a long-running collaboration with John A. Baldwin.Sep 1, 2022
  • Represented the USA at the 2001 International Olympiad in Informatics (Tampere, Finland), winning a bronze medal with 173 points (rank ~117), before going on to a PhD in pure mathematics — an early signal of the computational strength he later brought to SageMath and topology.Jul 21, 2001
  • Publishes at a very high rate with recurring co-authors John A. Baldwin, Raphael Zentner, Lenhard Ng and Ying Hu across Adv./Duke/JEMS/Geometry & Topology venues, making him a central node in the instanton/Floer-homology knot-detection community.2024
  • Contributed to SageMath (then SAGE) as an undergraduate around 2005-2006, authoring the Sloane OEIS database interface and adding support for relative number field extensions — concrete evidence he wrote production math software, not just theory.May 12, 2006
  • Won the 2002 National Science Bowl as a TJHSST student, then chose pure mathematics over a computing career; the trajectory from contest programming to low-dimensional topology suggests the contests were a launchpad rather than a destination.2002
  • Was a systems administrator in the TJ Computer Systems Lab (tjcsl) at Thomas Jefferson High School, class of 2002; the same lab culture produced multiple USA IOI medalists, tying his early coding work to the TJ pipeline.2002
  • Maintains an active public-facing role as a mathematics communicator: gives named talks such as 'How to Identify Knots' to student societies (The Archimedeans) and subscribes to MathOverflow under his own name.2024

Competition record

United States of America · IOI

2001 · Bronze · Rank 117