Rate My Professor Anne Thomas

Anne Thomas is a Professor and Associate Professor in Pure Mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney, part of the Faculty of Science. Her research centers on geometric group theory, Coxeter groups, buildings, and actions of discrete groups on nonpositively curved spaces. Official fields of research encompass group theory and generalisations, topology, combinatorics and discrete mathematics (excluding physical combinatorics), and algebra and number theory. She belongs to the Geometry, Topology and Analysis research group and has contributed to understanding divergence functions, quasi-isometry classifications, and automorphism groups in these contexts.

At the University of Sydney since 2015, Thomas has taught advanced courses including MATH5340 Topics in Topology, Honours Functional Analysis, and the geometry half of MATH3061 Geometry and Topology. In 2025, she secured an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship of $1,175,732 for "Connection via reflections: A new approach to Coxeter groups," developing novel combinatorial techniques for infinite Coxeter groups. She has earned the AustMS WIMSIG Anne Penfold Street Award. With 419 citations on Google Scholar, her influential publications include "Divergence in right-angled Coxeter groups" (Pallavi Dani and Anne Thomas, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 2015, 49 citations); "Problems on automorphism groups of nonpositively curved polyhedral complexes and their lattices" (Benson Farb, G. Christopher Hruska, and Anne Thomas, 2008, 46 citations); "Bowditch's JSJ tree and the quasi-isometry classification of certain Coxeter groups" (Pallavi Dani and Anne Thomas, Journal of Topology, 2017, 32 citations); "Lattices acting on right-angled buildings" (Anne Thomas, 2006, 32 citations); "Dimensions of affine Deligne–Lusztig varieties: a new approach via labeled folded alcove walks and root operators" (Elizabeth Milićević, Petra Schwer, and Anne Thomas, 2019, 26 citations); "Commensurability for certain right-angled Coxeter groups and geometric amalgams of free groups" (Pallavi Dani, Emily Stark, and Anne Thomas, 2018, 24 citations); and recent works such as "Divergence, thickness and hypergraph index for general Coxeter groups" (2026) and "Fixed points for group actions on 2-dimensional affine buildings" (2024). Her collaborations span international researchers in group theory and geometry.