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Dr. Dennis DeTurck
Biography:
Dr. Dennis DeTurck is the Chairman of the Mathematics Department, and holds the title of "Davidson Kennedy Professor in the College" of Arts and Sciences. He has been on Penn's faculty since 1982 (Prior to this date, Dr. DeTurck taught at New York University for a few years). Mathematical interests mainly concern specialties called differential geometry and partial differential equations. Differential geometry is the study of curved surfaces and their higher-dimensional generalizations. It is the mathematics behind general relativity as well as the basis for the study of dynamical systems. Partial differential equations concern how quantities that depend on more than one variable change with time. At the moment, Dr. DeTurck's research centers on the problem of understanding the shape of DNA, particularly how something that big (human DNA molecules can be up to 3 meters in length) can coil around it self tightly enough to fit into the nucleus of a cell.
As is often the case with mathematics, it turns out that the mathematics that are used to understand problems such as this can also be used to understand other things. In particular, the shapes of laboratory and stellar plasmas (used in experimental attempts to control nuclear fusion) are determined by the same geometry and the same partial differential equations as the shape of DNA molecules.
Homepage: http://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/
