Department of Mathematical Sciences · Carnegie Mellon University

Florian Frick

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

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About

Geometry, topology, and discrete structure

Before joining CMU, I was an H. C. Wang Assistant Professor at Cornell University and a Ph.D. student at TU Berlin. I spent Fall 2017 at MSRI in Berkeley, and during the 2021–22 academic year I visited Freie Universität Berlin.

My research is driven by the idea that numerous (often discrete) mathematical problems can be exhibited as shadows of rich geometric structures. The central goal is to make these hidden structures visible and to use them as a source of global information. In many combinatorial settings, local consistency is easy to recognize while global compatibility is subtle; topology is especially powerful because it is designed to detect precisely such global obstructions. This perspective turns questions about colorings, partitions, selections, embeddings, fairness, metric structure, and algebraic or computational complexity into questions about the shape of an associated space.

Research interests

  • Geometric and topological combinatorics
  • Convex and discrete geometry
  • Metric geometry
  • Geometric topology
  • Applied algebraic topology
  • Fair division