Professor
Department of Mathematics
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
Email: clayton.shonkwiler@colostate.edu
Office: Weber 206C
Phone: (970)491.1822
Curriculum Vitæ
My primary research interest is in using geometry to understand the world. I use tools from differential, Riemannian, symplectic, and algebraic geometry and the problems I am interested in come from polymer physics, signal processing, and knot theory, among others. Please see the research page for more.
Group
Graduate Students
- Tristan Neighbors (Ph.D. 2026; M.S. 2023)
- Page Wilson (M.S. 2025)
- Joe Geisz
Group Alumni
Postdocs
- Dongwei Chen (2024–2026; now tenure-track assistant professor at University of Idaho)
- Harrison Chapman (2017–2019; now staff software engineer at Google)
Graduate Students
- Anthony Caine (Ph.D. 2024; now assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University)
- Brian Collery (Ph.D. 2024; now founder at Pinpoint Maths)
- Colin Roberts (Ph.D. 2022; now scientific software architect at Xcimer Energy)
- Thomas D. Eddy (M.S. 2019; now data engineer at the New York Times)
Undergraduate Students
- Yekaterina Aimukanova
- Laney Bowden
- Erin Gunn
- Andrea Haynes
- Nikita Lavrenov
- Tucker Manton
- Nikolai Sannikov
- Aaron Shukert
- Gavin Stewart
- Kandin Theis
- Bogdan Vasilchenko
News
- August 2026 “Hard unknots are often easy from a different perspective”, by Jason Cantarella, Henrik Schumacher, and Clayton Shonkwiler, posted to arXiv.
- August 2026 Grid is being exhibited at the Bridges 2026 Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design, August 5–8, 2026.
- July 2026 “Optimization and the topology of spaces of Parseval frames”, by Anthony Caine, Tom Needham, and Clayton Shonkwiler, published in the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.
- June 2026 “Looping animations using the modular flow and elliptic functions” published in Proceedings of Bridges 2026.
- June 2026 “New upper bounds for stick numbers”, by Jason Cantarella, Andrew Rechnitzer, Henrik Schumacher, and Clayton Shonkwiler, published in the Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications.
Support
Some of my research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (DMS–2107700) and the Simons Foundation (#354225 and #709150). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.