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
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
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
- 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.
- 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!
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.