Date of Birth: 
About Martin Dunwoody
- Martin John Dunwoody (born 3 November 1938) is an emeritus professor of Mathematics at the University of Southampton, England. He earned his Ph.D.
- in 1964 from the Australian National University.
- He held positions at the University of Sussex before becoming a professor at the University of Southampton in 1992.
- He has been emeritus professor since 2003. Dunwoody works on geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology.
- He is a leading expert in splittings and accessibility of discrete groups, groups acting on graphs and trees, JSJ-decompositions, the topology of 3-manifolds and the structure of their fundamental groups. Since 1971 several mathematicians have been working on Wall's conjecture, posed by Wall in a 1971 paper, which said that all finitely generated groups are accessible.
- Roughly, this means that every finitely generated group can be constructed from finite and one-ended groups via a finite number of amalgamated free products and HNN extensions over finite subgroups.
- In view of the Stallings theorem about ends of groups, one-ended groups are precisely those finitely generated infinite groups that cannot be decomposed nontrivially as amalgamated products or HNN-extensions over finite subgroups. Dunwoody proved the Wall conjecture for finitely presented groups in 1985.
- In 1991 he finally disproved Wall's conjecture by finding a finitely generated group that is not accessible.Dunwoody found a graph-theoretic proof of Stallings' theorem about ends of groups in 1982, by constructing certain tree-like automorphism invariant graph decompositions.
- This work has been developed to an important theory in the book Groups acting on graphs, Cambridge University Press, 1989, with Warren Dicks.
- In 2002 Dunwoody put forward a proposed proof of the Poincaré conjecture.
- The proof generated considerable interest among mathematicians, but a mistake was quickly discovered and the proof was withdrawn.
- The conjecture was later proven by Grigori Perelman, following the program of Richard S.
- Hamilton.
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