Casey Mann


Casey Mann is an American mathematician, specialising in discrete and computational geometry, in particular tessellation and knot theory. He is Professor for Mathematics at University of Washington Bothell, and received the PhD at the University of Arkansas in 2001.
He is known for his 2015 discovery, with Jennifer McLoud-Mann and undergraduate student David Von Derau, of the 15th and last class of convex pentagons to tile the plane.
Mann is also known for his work on the Heesch's problem, to which he contributed the polygon with the largest known Heesch number, which was covered in a numberphile video. This problem is closely related to the einstein problem, of whether there exists a shape that can tessellate space, but only in a nonperiodic way.

Education and career

Mann received his B.S. of Mathematics at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, and completed his Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Arkansas. His dissertation in discrete geometry, supervised by Chaim Goodman-Strauss, was Heesch's Problem and Other Tiling Problems.
Upon completing his doctorate, Mann joined the University of Texas at Tyler faculty for eleven years.. He joined the faculty of University of Washington Bothell in 2013, where he is active in engaging undergraduate students in research.