Dr Bea Bleile
Senior Lecturer in Mathematics - Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law; School of Science and Technology
Biography
While Dr Bleile enjoyed mathematics at high school, her appreciation of and love for the subject only began to develop during her undergraduate studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where she had enrolled to study physics. She changed to mathematics, completed her Diplom in May 1993 and then took up a three year contract as associate lecturer at UNE.
In 1996 she enrolled for an MSc in homological algebra under the supervision of Peter Hilton to stay in touch with mathematics while caring for their young child. On submitting the Masters thesis in 1999, she enrolled in a PhD in low dimensional algebraic topology under the supervision of Jonathan Hillman at the University of Sydney.
After completing her doctorate in 2005, she spent the academic year 2006-2007 as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH, working on the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism in theoretical physics with Jürg Fröhlich and Carlo Albert. Her collaboration with Hans-Joachim Baues on algebraic topology began in 2007 when she was a guest at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.
Manifolds play an important role in many branches of mathematics and theoretical physics. For example, in general relativity the universe is a 4-dimensional manifold with three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension given by time. Since many properties of manifolds depend only on the homotopy type of a manifold, that is, they do not change under continuous deformation or homotopy, it has proven fruitful to study Poincaré duality complexes which are homotopy theoretic generalisations of manifolds. These form the main focus of her research.
More recently she started working in Topological Data Analysis.
