Faculty Profiles

faculty photo imageDavid Perkinson

F.L. Griffin Professor of Mathematics
Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

David Perkinson was trained in algebraic geometry at the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1990). He has published on the subjects of toric varieties, the inflectionary behavior of embeddings, polyhedra, hyperplane arrangements, and tilings. His current research interest is the Abelian sandpile model (ASM) and the closely related subject of divisors on graphs, for which the central object of study is the discrete Laplacian operator on a network. Perkinson has been a visitor at the University of Oslo, Norway, and the University of Genoa, Italy, and has taught at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa, in Ghana, and in Cameroon. He has recently served as co-organizer for workshops on the Abelian sandpile model: Generalizations of chip-firing and the critical group (July 2013) American Institute of Mathematics, Palo Alto, CA, and Sandpile groups (November 2015) BIRS-CMO, Oaxaca, Mexico. In his 32 years of teaching at Reed College, he has advised approximately 50 senior theses on a wide range of topics.

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