Haynes Miller

Bio

Haynes Miller joined the MIT mathematics faculty as professor in 1986. A graduate of Harvard College, he received the Ph.D. from Princeton University under the direction of John C. Moore in 1974. Following assistant professorships at Harvard and Northwestern Universities, he joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1977, and the faculty of Notre Dame as professor in 1984. In 1992-93, he served as Chair of the Pure Mathematics Committee. From 2004 to 2013 Professor Miller chaired the Undergraduate Mathematics Committee, a role he continued to play as Associate Department Head from July 2011 to June 2013. In July 2021, he retired as a Full Professor, and is now Professor Emeritus of Mathematics.

Professor Miller's early research (in part with Doug Ravenel and Steve Wilson) set the stage for "chromatic homotopy theory," a perspective that has served a dominant paradigm in stable homotopy theory for almost half a century. His solution of a well-known conjecture due to Dennis Sullivan opened the door for the development of a purely homotopy-theoretic generalization of the theory of Lie groups. More recently, in collaboration with Mike Hopkins, he lifted the algebra of deformation theory and elliptic moduli into homotopy theory.

Author of several dozen research papers, editor of the Handbook of Homotopy Theory (2020), and author of Lectures on Algebraic Topology (2021), Professor Miller has served on many editorial boards, including as managing editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (1995--1996). He has directed thesis research for 30 PhD students.

Professor Miller has worked on many educational initiatives. He was the Mathematics liaison for the Cambridge-MIT Exchange program (and received a Cambridge-MIT fellowship in 2003). He created (and still oversees) the MIT Mathlets and the Online Seminar on Undergraduate Mathematics Education. Professor Miller was selected by MIT as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2005 for "exemplary and sustained contributions to the teaching and education of undergraduates at MIT," and received the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award of the School of Science in 2006 and the Alan J. Lazarus Award for Excellence in Advising in 2021. He has been deeply involved with the MIT-Haiti Initiative since its inception, and served as Senior Faculty Associate for the Jameel World Educational Lab in 2023.