Hyam Rubinstein

J. Hyam Rubinstein
J. Hyam Rubinstein in 2005 (photo from MFO)
Born	March 7, 1948 Melbourne
Nationality	Australian
Fields	low-dimensional topology
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	John Robert Stallings
Doctoral students	Jose Ayala Benjamin Burton Bell Foozwell
Known for	3-sphere recognition
Notable awards	Australian Mathematical Society Medal George Szekeres Medal (2008) Hannan Medal (2003)

J. (Joachim) Hyam Rubinstein FAA (born 7 March 1948, in Melbourne) is^[update] an Australian mathematician specialising in low-dimensional topology, serving as a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne.

He has spoken and written widely on the state of the mathematical sciences in Australia, with particular focus on the impacts of reduced Government spending for university mathematics departments.

In 1965, he matriculated (i.e. graduated) from Melbourne High School in Melbourne, Australia winning the maximum of four exhibitions.

In 1969, he graduated from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia with a B.Sc.(Honours) degree in mathematics.

In 1974, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley under the advisorship of John Stallings. His dissertation was on the topic of Isotopies of Incompressible Surfaces in Three Dimensional Manifolds.

His major contributions include results involving almost normal Heegaard splittings and the closely related joint work with Pitts relating strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings to minimal surfaces, joint work with William Jaco on special triangulations of 3-manifolds (namely 0-efficient and 1-efficient triangulations), and joint work with Martin Scharlemann on the Rubinstein-Scharlemann graphic. He is a key figure in the algorithmic theory of 3-manifolds, and one of the initial developers of Regina which implements his 3-sphere recognition algorithm.