Jayadev Athreya | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

PIMS Site Director & Professor of Mathematics, University of Washington

Jayadev Athreya is a Professor of Mathematics and the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, and the founder of the Washington Experimental Mathematics Lab. He is originally from Ames, Iowa where he graduated from Iowa State University. Athreya completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, took on postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and Princeton, and was previously at the University of Illinois before moving to the University of Washington. He has held visiting positions in the UK, France, and India. His research includes geometry, dynamical systems, and the creative processes of mathematics.

Professor Athreya was Interim Director of PIMS from July 2021-June 2022, and under his leadership PIMS received an NSERC Discovery Institutes Grant and a Simons Targeted Institutes Grant. Professor Athreya helped develop a new distributed leadership model for PIMS, and as part of this, from July 2022-June 2024, Professor Athreya was co-Director, International for PIMS. Professor Athreya has also served on the Director’s advisory council, and as Special Advisor to the Director. He was the Chair of the 2022 Pacific Rim Mathematical Association (PRIMA) Scientific Committee.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2021.

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Math Circles are the improvisational comedy of mathematics: you start with a script, and then you say “yes, and...” to all questions and queries, building an atmosphere of exploration and discovery that builds enthusiasm for mathematics. They work at...

In joint work with David Aulicino and Pat Hooper, we study the problem of finding closed geodesics passing through exactly one vertex on the surfaces of Platonic solids. We show that there are no such trajectories on any of the solids except the...

We describe various models of creating communities of mathemati- cal explorers, inspired by our work at Illinois and Washington, and earlier work at Maryland. We will outline how we think any Math department can be the center of a vibrant...

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