Rate My Professor Ivan Smith

Collaborating with various researchers, Smith has employed Floer theory to develop novel invariants for knots and links, derive universal constraints on billiard trajectories across flat surfaces, prove that symplectic symmetry groups possess infinite complexity, and verify additional cases of mirror symmetry. His impactful contributions have garnered major accolades: the London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize (2007), the Adams Prize (2013), an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (2018), designation as Clay Senior Scholar (2022), and election as Fellow of the Royal Society (2023). Key publications encompass 'Spectral Floer theory and tangential structures' (2026, with N. Porcelli), 'Symplectomorphisms and spherical objects in the conifold smoothing' (2025, with A. Keating), 'Gromov-Witten Invariants in Complex and Morava-Local K-Theories' (2024, with M. Abouzaid and M. McLean), 'Irrationality and monodromy for cubic threefolds' (2023), 'Double bubble plumbings and two-curve flops' (2023, with M. Wemyss), 'Quantitative Heegaard Floer cohomology and the Calabi invariant' (2022, with D. Cristofaro-Gardiner et al.), 'Floer Theory of Higher Rank Quiver 3-folds' (2021), and 'Fukaya categories of surfaces, spherical objects and mapping class groups' (2021, with D. Auroux). Smith organizes workshops like 'Floer theory beyond Floer' (2026) and supervises doctoral students in symplectic and low-dimensional topology.