Allison N. Miller

About me:

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Swarthmore College. During 2024-2025 I'll be on sabbatical, spending the fall visiting UT Austin to collaborate with colleagues there.

I've recently taught Math 20: Mathematics and Social Justice (S'22, S'24), Math 27: Linear Algebra (F'21, F'22, F'23 x 2), Math 67: Introduction to Modern Algebra (S'23 x 2), Math 69: Combinatorics (F'22), Math 104: Topology (S'24), and a 4-student directed reading in knot theory (S'23).

I do research in low-dimensional topology, exploring what knots and surfaces can tell us about the strange world of 4-dimensional topology. You can see me talk about my work here (5 minutes, for a general audience, as part of the College of Natural Science's 'Science in a Flash' event at Rice) or here (30 minutes, for an audience of topologists, as part of the Trends in Low-Dimensional Topology series). You can find out more about my research here.

I also maintain a list of resources on ethics in mathematics, first created as I developed a course in Spring 2021. A description of that course, A Mini-seminar: Teaching Ethics in Mathematics in an Hour a Week, recently appeared in Journal of Humanistic Mathematics as part of their special issue on ethics in math.

For those on the job market: you can find the research statement, teaching statement, and cover letter from my job search in 2020 here, tailored for a job search aiming at liberal arts colleges that value both research and teaching highly.

My CV, up to date as of August 2023, is available here.

Biography:

I grew up outside of Washington, DC in Arlington, VA, where for seven years I attended H-B Woodlawn, an alternative public school program, graduating in 2008.
I then attended Pomona College in Claremont, CA for four years, except for a semester spent at the Budapest Semester in Mathematics program in Budapest, Hungary. I graduated in May 2012 after doing a senior thesis with Erica Flapan.
I received my PhD in May 2018 from the University of Texas at Austin, where my advisor was Cameron Gordon. During my PhD, I spent fall 2016 participating in the Knot Concordance and 4-Manifolds group of the Junior Trimester in Topology at the Hausdorff Institute of Bonn, Germany.
I then spent 3 years as a postdoc/ G.C. Evans Instructor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, before starting at Swarthmore in fall 2021.

You can find my papers on the arXiv and find me in my office, Science Center 150. My email is amille11@swarthmore.edu and my address is Swarthmore College/ Department of Mathematics and Statistics/ 500 College Avenue/ Swarthmore, PA 19081/ USA.

Disambiguation: I am not Allison Moore, also once a student of Cameron Gordon at UT Austin, also once a postdoc at Rice in HBH 456, but now an Associate Professor at VCU. Nor am I Alison Miller, a mathematician and associate editor at Mathematical Reviews. I can be distinguished from the many other Allison Millers in the world (who the reader can go out and discover for themselves) by my middle name- so far as I know I am the only Allison Northey Miller.

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