Ben Webster

My research is on connections between representation theory, mathematical physics, geometry and topology, including knot homology, the geometry of symplectic singularities, and categorification. I moved to Waterloo and Perimeter in 2017. In the past, I've been an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia , Northeastern University and the University of Oregon , a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT , and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study . I received my Ph.D. in 2007 from UC Berkeley, under the supervision of Nicolai Reshetikhin, and spent the fall of 2006 at the Center for the Topology and Quantization of Moduli Spaces in Aarhus, Denmark. In Spring 2014, I was a Junior Chair at Université Denis-Diderot (Paris 7) with support from Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris. Before that, I studied at Simon's Rock College and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics Program . Before I moved to Canada, my research was supported by the NSF under a CAREER award , and graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, and by a Sloan Research Fellowship.

I'm a professor in Pure Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and supervise students, including PI residents, in the PhD program there.

If you are interested in working with me as a PhD student, please send me an email at [email protected]. Perimeter Institute is committed to diversity within its community and I welcome applications from underrepresented groups. Information about working with me as a graduate student can be found on my webpage here: https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/b2webste/info-students

My research is on the interface between representation theory, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. Hyperkahler cones appear naturally in physics as branches of moduli spaces of vacua for N=4 d=3 field theories; on the other hand, they are of mathematical interest because of their symplectic resolutions of singularities, and the fact that they can be quantized to produce interesting non-commutative algebras such as universal enveloping algebras and Cherednik algebras. I'm interested in the representation theory of algebras that appear this way, and how it relates to fields like topology and combinatorics; since coming to Perimeter, one of my focuses has been how understanding these varieties in the context of field theory gives us insight into the mathematics.