Associate Professor
Associate Chair/Undergraduate Director
Department of Mathematics
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
Email: clayton.shonkwiler@colostate.edu
Office: Weber 206C
Phone: (970)491.1822
Curriculum Vitæ
This semester I am teaching:
- Math 618 — Advanced Real Analysis
Previous courses can be found on the teaching page.
My primary research interest is in using geometry to solve topological and physical problems. I am currently working on a long-term project which uses Riemannian and symplectic geometry to develop a new framework for understanding the probability theory of topologically constrained random walks and polymer networks. A newer but very promising project uses symplectic geometry to answer long-standing questions in frame theory and statistical signal processing. Please see the research page for more.
Group
Postdocs
Graduate Students
- Tristan Neighbors (Ph.D. 2026; M.S. 2023)
- Page Wilson (M.S. 2025)
- Joe Geisz
Group Alumni
Postdocs
- 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
- May 2026 Tristan Neighbors has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations, Dr. Neighbors!
- May 2026 “Approximately dual and pseudo-dual probabilistic frames”, by Dongwei Chen, Emily J. King, and Clayton Shonkwiler, published in Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis.
- April 2026 Dongwei Chen has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Idaho, to start in Fall 2026. Congratulations, Dongwei!
- April 2026 “Random knotting in very long off-lattice self-avoiding polygons”, by Jason Cantarella, Tetsuo Deguchi, Henrik Schumacher, Clayton Shonkwiler, and Erica Uehara, published in the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical.
- April 2026 “Direct sampling of confined polygons in linear time”, by Clayton Shonkwiler and Kandin Theis, published in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics.
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.