Gunnar Carlsson
President, Ayasdi

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Gunnar Carlsson is a professor of mathematics (emeritus) at Stanford University and cofounder and president at Ayasdi, which is commercializing products based on machine intelligence and topological data analysis. Gunnar has spent his career devoted to the study of topology, the mathematical study of shape. Originally, his work focused on the pure aspects of the field, but in 2000 he began work on the applications of topology to the analysis of large and complex datasets, which led to a number of projects, notably a multi-university initiative funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of California, San Diego, Princeton University, and, since 1991, Stanford University, where he has served as the chair of the Mathematics Department. He is also a founder of the ATMCS series of conferences focusing on the applications of topology and a founding editor of the Journal for Applied and Computational Topology. Gunnar is the author of over 100 academic papers and has given numerous addresses to scholarly meetings. He holds a BA in mathematics from Harvard and a PhD in mathematics from Stanford. He is married with three grown children.