by David Epstein
Peter Scott died on 19 September 2023 after a long battle with cancer. He was one of the first Warwick Ph.D. students. The Mathematics Department started in 1964, a year before any other Warwick department, and Peter arrived a year later. His Ph.D. supervisor was Brian Sanderson (now retired). Peter’s first job was at Liverpool University where he eventually became a professor, before emigrating to a professorship at the University of Michigan.
Among many fine results, the one that surprised many of us the most was the Scott Core Theorem, where he proved that if a noncompact 3-manifold has a finitely generated fundamental group, then it contains a compact submanifold with boundary, whose fundamental group maps isomorphically to the fundamental group of the larger manifold. He was invited to explain his result at the famous Bourbaki Seminar in Paris. Peter’s result contributed to the growing realisation that the important 3-manifolds might, perhaps, be simply described, avoiding horrors like the complement of the Alexander Horned Sphere.
Peter’s expository paper “The geometries of 3-manifolds”1 introduced the mathematical public to Bill Thurston’s remarkable Geometrization Conjecture, of which the even more famous Poincaré Conjecture is a special case. Peter’s paper has been cited nearly two thousand times, setting the scene for the amazing proofs, at first with additional hypotheses by Thurston (Fields Medallist), and then in full by Perelman (Fields Medallist), of what is now known as the Geometrization Theorem.
With Mike Freedman (Fields Medallist) and Joel Hass, Peter helped establish minimal surface theory as a new and important tool in 3-manifold theory.
Peter will be missed both as a mathematician and for his easy and warm friendliness.
