MSI congratulates Brett Parker on being awarded the 2021 Gavin Brown Best Paper Prize. The Gavin Brown Prize recognises outstanding and innovative research in the mathematical sciences

The prize is for Brett’s work in geometry, topology and mathematical physics developing the theory of exploded manifolds. On the small scale, these exploded manifolds look like ordinary spaces, but on the large scale, they are piecewise-linear. His work uses exploded manifolds to study holomorphic curves — which arise in string theory as the world-sheets traced out over time by strings.