I am an Assistant Professor in  the Mathematics  Department at Florida State University. My research is in geometry and topology, with a focus on applications to problems in data science. My work uses tools from Riemannian, symplectic and metric geometry, topological data analysis and optimal transport. 

My research is partially supported by NSF grants DMS--2107808 and DMS--2324962 

For more details, please see the Research page or my Curriculum Vitae (updated May 2024).

Contact me at tneedham (at) fsu (dot) edu

News:

• 6/27/25: Our paper Equivalence of Landscape and Erosion Distances for Persistence Diagrams, C. Ayhan and T. Needham, was posted to ArXiv. Preprint. 

• 6/6/25: Our paper Path constrained unbalanced optimal transport, M. Bauer, N. Charon, T. Needham, M. Nishino, was accepted to Nonlinearity.

• 5/21/25: Our paper Optimization and the Topology of Spaces of Parseval Frames, A. Caine, T. Needham and C. Shonkwiler, was posted to ArXiv. Preprint. 

• 5/15/25: Our paper Robust Representation and Estimation of Barycenters and Modes of Probability Measures on Metric Spaces, W. Mio and T. Needham, was posted to ArXiv.  Preprint. 

• 3/30/25: Our paper Flexible and Probabilistic Topology Tracking with Partial Optimal Transport, M. Li,  X. Yan, L. Yan, T. Needham, B. Wang was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Computer Graphics and Visualization. Preprint. 

• 3/25/25: Our paper On the Existence of Parseval Frames for Vector Bundles, S. A. Ballas, T. Needham and C. Shonkwiler, was published in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Paper.  Preprint.

• 3/11/25: Our paper Topological optimal transport for geometric cycle matching, S. Zhang, M. P. H. Stumpf, T. Needham and A. Barbensi was accepted to Journal of Applied and Computational Topology. Paper.  Preprint. 

• 1/23/25: Our paper Interleaving distances, monoidal actions and 2-categories, P. McFaddin and T. Needham, was accepted to Algebraic and Geometric Topology. 

• 1/3/25: Our paper Cortical Coding of Gustatory and Thermal Signals in Active Licking Mice, Audrey N. Nash, Morgan Shakeshaft, Cecilia G Bouaichi, Katherine E Odegaard, Tom Needham, Martin Bauer, Richard Bertram, and Roberto Vincis, was accepted to Journal of Physiology.