C. Graham, PhD

C. Robin Graham is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Washington whose contributions to conformal geometry and the mathematical physics of curved spaces have shaped fields ranging from pure differential geometry to theoretical physics. Graham earned his B.A. and M.A. at Rice University in 1976 and his doctorate in mathematics at Princeton University in 1981, under the direction of Elias Stein. He spent his career at the University of Washington, where he is now professor emeritus. His most celebrated work is a long collaboration with Charles Fefferman on the ambient construction — a framework for extending a conformal manifold to a higher-dimensional ambient Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian space in order to produce conformally invariant objects. That construction has become a central tool in conformal differential geometry and has deep connections to the mathematical formulation of the AdS/CFT correspondence in theoretical physics. The GJMS operators — a family of conformally invariant differential operators — are named in part for Graham. He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and retired from the University of Washington in 2018.