Profile: Julian Thurston

Julian Steward

POWERS Julian

The Unitary Executive offers a powerful case for the historical pedigree of the unitary executive theory. Offering an account of presidential practice stemming from George Washington to George W. Bush, the book seeks to ground unitary executive theory with exhaustive historical evidence. Although the authors do not purport to present a history of the presidency, they do provide important and co...

Statement Julian

My mathematical research interests are in number theory and algebraic geometry. My thesis work concerns the arithmetic of a family of rational numbers known as multiple harmonic sums, which are truncated approximations of multiple zeta values. I explore new structures underlying relations involving multiple harmonic sums, p-adic L-values, Bernoulli numbers, and binomial coefficients. This is us...

The Thurston Norm

Suppose a 2-handle is attached to a compact orientable 3-manifold M along an annulus A contained in a subsurface N of a M . If N is compressible in M, but N -A is not, then the Thurston norm is unaffected. This generalizes a series of results due to Przytycki, Jaco, and Johannson. Following Thurston [Th],define the complexity X(S) of an oriented surface S to be -x(C), where C is the union of al...

Nearly Euclidean Thurston Maps

We take an in-depth look at Thurston’s combinatorial characterization of rational functions for a particular class of maps we call nearly Euclidean Thurston maps. These are orientation-preserving branched maps f : S2 → S2 whose local degree at every critical point is 2 and which have exactly four postcritical points. These maps are simple enough to be tractable, but are complicated enough to ha...