Awards

Distinguished Professor (2021)

Titled Professor (2020)

Ruth N. Halls Professor

About David Fisher

David Fisher earned his B.A. in mathematics from Columbia University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. He was a postdoctoral National Science Foundation fellow at Yale University before holding faculty appointments at Lehman College and CUNY Graduate Center. Fisher joined the Department of Mathematics at IU Bloomington as an assistant professor in 2005, was promoted to associate professor in 2008 and professor in 2010. In 2020, Fisher was named the Ruth N. Halls Professor.

A pure mathematician, Fisher’s research has made critical contributions to quasi-isometric rigidity of polycyclic groups and arithmeticity of hyperbolic manifolds. His breakthrough work, in collaboration with Brown and Hurtado, solved Zimmer’s conjecture, an open mathematical question since the early 1980s. Most recently, Fisher (in collaboration with Miller and Stover), solved a major conjecture by proving that M is a finite-volume hyperbolic manifold containing infinitely many totally geodesic surfaces than M is arithmetic, solving a question that has been open for decades.

Fisher has authored or co-authored over 40 publications and has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation since 1999. He has held the most prestigious fellowships in mathematics including two Simon’s Foundation Fellowships and the NSF CAREER award. He has held visiting fellowship and lecture appointments at UC Berkeley, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Newton Institute at Cambridge University, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, New York University, Institut Mittag-Leffler, University of Paris, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Max Planck Institute. In 2017, he presented the invited Seminaire Bourbaki Lecture and he was elected an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012. Fisher serves as an editor of four top math journals: Journal of Topology and Analysis, Geometriae Dedicata, Indiana University Mathematics Journal, and Geometry and Topology. He has given invited talks in Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, Poland, France, Israel, Finland, Sweden, United Kingdom, and throughout the United States.