Porter Morgan

I'm a fifth year Math PhD student at the University of Massachussets Amherst, advised by Inanc Baykur. I study low-dimensional topology, specifically 4-manifolds. I'm interested in Lefschetz fibrations, nonorientable 4-manifolds, and exotic smooth structures.

Contact: pamorgan AT umass DOT edu

Papers and preprints:

• Irreducible 4-manifolds with order two fundamental group. Joint with Mihail Arabadji. Preprint, 2025. [PDF]
• Belted sum decompositions of fully augmented links. with Brian Ransom, Dean Spyropoulos, Rolland Trapp, and Cameron Ziegler. New York J. Math, 31 (2025):1-42, 2024. [PDF]

Recent and upcoming activity:

• June 2025: Attending the Summer School and Conference on Modern Developments in Low-Dimensional Topology in Trieste, Italy.
• May 2025: Speaking at "Women and Gender Minorities in Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology," special session of the AWM Research Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin.
• April 2025: Speaking at MIT's Geometry and Topology Seminar.
• February 2025: Speaking at Louisiana State University's Geometry and Topology Seminar about my latest project on irreducible 4-manifolds with order two fundamental group.

Some other stuff about me:

• I love to cook, and maintain an active food blog. Currently, I'm taking a break from updating the blog, and instead am working on building a blog site from scratch using the Django framework.
• I have a Github page, where you can find some web development projects. My math research is also up there, but that stuff's top-secret, so those repositories are private.
• Other hobbies include playing billiards and cheering for the Detroit Lions. I used to say that I enjoy road cycling, but that was when I lived in Amherst (where the roads are good). Now that I live in Boston (where the roads are bad), I've switched to running.