Rate My Professor Bea Bleile

Dr. Bea Bleile is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics in the School of Science and Technology at the University of New England. Her academic background includes a Diploma in Mathematics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, obtained in 1993 after initially enrolling to study physics and switching to mathematics. Upon completion, she took up a three-year contract as an associate lecturer at the University of New England. In 1996, she enrolled in an MSc in homological algebra at UNE under Peter Hilton, submitting her thesis in 1999 while caring for her young child. She then pursued a PhD in low-dimensional algebraic topology at the University of Sydney under Jonathan Hillman, completing her doctorate in 2005. Following this, Bleile spent the 2006-2007 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH, working on the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism in theoretical physics with Jürg Fröhlich and Carlo Albert. Her collaboration with Hans-Joachim Baues on algebraic topology commenced in 2007 during a guest stay at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

Bleile's research centers on Poincaré duality complexes, homotopy-theoretic generalizations of manifolds that are significant in mathematics and theoretical physics, such as modeling the four-dimensional spacetime in general relativity. Properties invariant under continuous deformation, or homotopy, make these complexes particularly fruitful for study. More recently, she has extended algebraic topology applications to persistent homology of dual digital image constructions, collaborating with Adélie Garin, Teresa Heiss, Kelly Maggs, and Vanessa Robins. Notable publications include 'The Persistent Homology of Dual Digital Image Constructions' (2022), 'Poincaré duality complexes with highly connected universal cover' with Imre Bokor and Jonathan Hillman (Algebraic & Geometric Topology, 2018), 'The third homotopy group as a pi1-module' with Hans-Joachim Baues (Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing, 2015), 'Batalin-Vilkovisky integrals in finite dimensions' with Jürg Fröhlich and Carlo Albert (Journal of Mathematical Physics, 2010), and 'Poincaré duality complexes in dimension four' with Hans-Joachim Baues (Algebraic and Geometric Topology, 2008). She teaches all undergraduate mathematics units as well as honours and postgraduate units in algebraic topology, homological algebra, category theory, differential geometry, and topological data analysis. Bleile holds memberships in the Australian Mathematical Society, Australian and New Zealand Association of Mathematical Physics, American Mathematical Society, and ETH Alumni.