Rate My Professor Pedro Ontaneda

Pedro Ontaneda is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematical Sciences in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Binghamton University, State University of New York. A leading figure in Mathematics, he has been a faculty member there since 2005, following his Ph.D. in 1994 from Stony Brook University, advised by Lowell Jones. He also holds a B.S. from Universidad Católica and an M.S. from Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

Ontaneda's research specializes in the topology of aspherical spaces and differential geometry. Renowned as one of the foremost geometers in the world, he has resolved longstanding open problems through innovative applications of analysis, topology, and geometry. His seminal contributions include constructing vast families of negatively curved manifolds—previously limited in examples and questioned by some—demonstrating their abundance and exotic topology. This work has revolutionized understanding in negative curvature, with broad implications for analytic geometry, number theory, spacetime studies, energy minimization problems, and theoretical physics. He has secured continuous National Science Foundation support since 2006 and earned the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2018.

Among his key publications are "Riemannian hyperbolization" (Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS, 2020), providing a smooth version of strict hyperbolization for cube manifolds; "On the topology of the space of negatively curved metrics" with F.T. Farrell (Journal of Differential Geometry, 2010); "Teichmüller Spaces and Negatively Curved Fiber Bundles" (Geometric and Functional Analysis, 2010); and "Closed geodesics on geodesic spaces of curvature bounded above" with C. Salviano (Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 2019). Ontaneda has mentored several doctoral students, including theses on warped product constructions relating to graphs of groups (T. Ofner, 2020), index theorems for closed geodesics (K. Bayes, 2019), and the topology of spaces of pinched negatively curved metrics (M. Bustamante, 2016).