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 617 — Integration and Measure Theory
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 (M.S. 2023)
- Page Wilson (M.S. 2025)
Group Alumni
Postdocs
- Harrison Chapman (2017–2019; now senior 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 instructor at Front Range Community College)
- Colin Roberts (Ph.D. 2022; now Chief Technology Officer at Multifactor)
- 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
- October, 2025 “Factoring the Laplacian to understand topological polymers”, by Jason Cantarella, Tetsuo Deguchi, Clayton Shonkwiler, and Erica Uehara, has been published in Europhysics Letters.
- September 2025 “Geometric approaches to matrix normalization and graph balancing”, by Tom Needham and Clayton Shonkwiler, published in Forum of Mathematics, Sigma.
- September 2025 “An exact formula for the contraction factor of a subdivided Gaussian topological polymer”, by Jason Cantarella, Tetsuo Deguchi, Clayton Shonkwiler, and Erica Uehara, has been published in J. Phys. A.
- August 2025 “New upper bounds for stick numbers”, by Jason Cantarella, Andrew Rechnitzer, Henrik Schumacher, and Clayton Shonkwiler, posted to arXiv.
- May 2025 “Sampling finite unit norm tight frames using symplectic geometry”, by Mason Faldet and Clayton Shonkwiler, posted to arXiv.
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.