Michael Hutchings (mathematician)

Michael Hutchings
Nationality	United States
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Clifford Taubes
Known for	Proof of the double bubble conjecture

Michael Lounsbery Hutchings is a mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for proving the double bubble conjecture on the shape of two-chambered soap bubbles, and for his work circle-valued Morse theory and on embedded contact homology, which he defined.

As an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Hutchings did an REU project with Frank Morgan at Williams College that began his interest in the mathematics of soap bubbles. He finished his undergraduate studies in 1993, and stayed at Harvard for graduate school, earning his Ph.D. in 1998 under the supervision of Clifford Taubes. After postdoctoral and visiting positions at Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2001.

His work on circle-valued Morse theory (partly in collaboration with Yi-Jen Lee) studies torsion invariants that arise from circle-valued Morse theory and, more generally, closed 1-forms, and relates them to the three-dimensional Seiberg-Witten invariants and the Meng-Taubes theorem, in analogy with Taubes's Gromov=Seiberg-Witten theorem in four dimensions.

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