Robert Lipshitz

I am a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oregon. My research focuses on low-dimensional topology and symplectic geometry. Like all tenure-line faculty in mathematics, I teach courses at all levels, depending on departmental need.

I am on leave for the 2025-2026 academic year, as the Minerva Visitor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton.

Research

• A list of my papers and preprints.
• Computer code used in my papers.
• A list of recent and upcoming talks.

Teaching

• Recent courses
  • Spring 2025: Math 251: Calculus 1
  • Spring 2025: Math 307: Introduction to Proofs
• Courses taught previously
• Research students

Service

Editorial work

If you would like me to handle your paper, consider submitting it to Quantum Topology, where I am an editor, or Geometry & Topology, where I am a managing editor. If you have a leadership role at a journal, allow me to recommend MSP’s EditFlow, which is less annoying than other editorial management software I have used.

K3

I am an editor for chapter 3 of the K3 List, a successor to Kirby’s problem lists in low-dimensional topology. We expect that the K3 list will be published by the AMS in 2026.

Topology seminar webpage

I often help organize the University of Oregon topology seminar, whose webpage is here. A full calendar of math seminars at the University of Oregon is here. If you are not a mathematician, you might be particularly interested in the public-facing Niven Lecture, Distinguished Lectures for Undergraduates, and AWM Speaker Series.

Ozsváth birthday conference

We expect to hold a conference at Princeton in the Summer of 2027 in honor of Peter Ozsváth’s 60th birthday. Dates and a link to the conference webpage will be posted here when available.

Other Professional Projects

I wrote several tutorials on using the open source 3D graphics software Blender to create line drawings for mathematics papers. (For instance, these explain how to make this site’s logo using Python in Blender.)

I wrote documentation for Bohua Zhan’s package bfh_python (for computing Heegaard Floer homology using bordered Heegaard Floer homology). The documentation is here; the package itself is on github. (After doing beautiful work on Floer theory, Zhan transitioned to a career in computer science.)

Contact