Stephen Mackes

I successfully defended my thesis at UIC in Mathematics in December 2025.

I now work as a math researcher at Rampart Communications. This work is on security and efficiency of digital signals at the physical layer.

I am interested in pleated planes, higher Teichmüller theory, character varieties for surface groups to complex Lie groups (mostly PSL(d, C)), and hyperbolic geometry.

My thesis advisor was Emily Dumas and the main result of my thesis guarantees that a (not necessarily convex) pleated surface is embedded (corresponds to a quasifuchsian representation) given locally small enough bending data. I have plans to prove a similar result for d-pleated planes.

Teaching:

I was a teaching assistant at UIC for

Math 125, 192, and 210 each of which was repeated for a few semesters.

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