Robert Burklund, Associate Professor

Robert grew up in San Diego, California, and completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at MIT in Boston. After graduating, he secured a prestigious NSF postdoctoral fellowship, which he decided to hold at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

Since arriving at our department in 2022, Robert has produced a string of mathematical breakthroughs. He has also proven himself to be a valuable department citizen and member of the mathematical community. 

Already Robert’s thesis provided a big splash, establishing highly coherent multiplications on certain fundamental spaces, contradicting a classical conjecture by Mahowald. Concurrently, he also provided classification results for highly connected high dimensional manifolds, together with coauthors Hahn and Senger, answering longstanding questions raised by C.T.C. Wall. Since then, he has gone from mathematical peak to peak, e.g., providing a chromatic version of Hilbert's classical Nullstellensatz (with Schlank and Yuan) and giving counterexamples to the famous telescope conjecture of Ravenel (with Levy, Hahn, and Schlank).

His work has been accepted in top journals such as Annals and Acta and featured in a survey in Quanta Magazine. He holds a Villum Young Investigator award.

At Copenhagen, he has mentored PhD and Master’s students, taught courses from elementary to research level, and helped strengthen and further invigorate our already renowned group in algebra and geometry and the DNRF Center for Geometry and Topology. 

Head of Section, Professor Jesper Grodal says: “It is rare to see such natural talent as Robert, who not only comes up with one mathematical breakthrough after another, but also displays himself as an energetic, thoughtful and caring member of our community, in so many ways.”

Head of Department Professor Mogens Steffensen continues: “We are very fortunate to have been able to attract Robert Burklund to our department. We have worked for many years to build up a world-class research environment in Copenhagen in a broad range of areas, and it is great to get leaders of the new generation on board. It is not every day that we hire permanent professors so shortly after their PhD, but with Robert, the file already spoke for itself."