Clayton Shonkwiler
Clayton Shonkwiler is a mathematician and artist.
He is committed to using geometry to understand the world.
In joint work with Cantarella and Deguchi, we identified planar polygons with points in certain Stiefel manifolds. While our main motivation was to understand the 3-dimensional polygons used to model ring polymers like bacterial DNA, the well-understood geometry of Stiefel manifolds and their associated Grassmannians also allows us to answer questions like “What’s the shortest path from A to Z?”