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:

• 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.

• 12/9/24: Our paper Generalized Dimension Reduction Using Semi-Relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein Distances, Ranthony A. Clark, Tom Needham,Thomas Weighill, was accepted to AAAI 2025. 

• 12/3/24: Our paper Stability of Hypergraph Invariants and Transformations, T. Needham and E. Semrad, 2024, was posted to ArXiv. Preprint. 

• 11/18/24: Our paper Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Variance Decomposition with Linear Optimal Transport, M. Wilson, T. Needham, and A. Srivastava, was posted to ArXiv: Preprint. 

• 11/4/24: Our paper Metric properties of partial and robust Gromov-Wasserstein distances, J. Chhoa, M. Ivanitskiy, F. Jiang, S. Li, D. McBride, T. Needham and K. O'Hare, was posted to ArXiv: Preprint. 

• 9/10/24: Our paper Geometry of the Space of Partitioned Networks: A Unified Theoretical and Computational Framework, Stephen Zhang, Fangfei Lan, Youjia Zhou, Agnese Barbensi, Michael P. H. Stumpf, Bei Wang and Tom Needham, was posted to ArXiv: Preprint. 

• 8/16/24: Our paper The Z-Gromov-Wasserstein Distance, Martin Bauer, Facundo Mémoli, Tom Needham, Mao Nishino, was posted to ArXiv: Preprint. 

• 8/8/24: Our paper Comparison Results for Gromov-Wasserstein and Gromov-Monge Distances, Facundo Mémoli, Tom Needham, was accepted for publication in ESAIM: Control, Optimization and Calculus of Variations.

• 5/31/24: Our paper Statistical Analysis of Complex Shape Graphs, Aditi Basu Bal, Xiaoyang Guo, Tom Needham, Anuj Srivastava, was accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

• 5/24/24: Our paper Generalized Dimension Reduction Using Semi-Relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein Distances, Ranthony A. Clark, Tom Needham,Thomas Weighill, was posted to ArXiv: Preprint. 

• 5/10/24: Our paper Geometric Approaches to Matrix Normalization and Graph Balancing, with Clayton Shonkwiler, was posted to the ArXiv: Preprint.