Current PhD students

• Nelson Kyakutwika, started 2023. Thesis project: Consistent Joint Modelling of SPX and VIX Financial Derivatives. Co-supervised by Dr Mesias Alfeus at the Department of Financial Risk Management at Stellenbosch. Nelson hails from Uganda.

• Dario Trinchero, started 2023. Thesis project: A new isomorphism between the skein space and the space of holomorphic sections in Chern-Simons theory.

• Filippos Sytilidis, PhD student at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford under Chris Douglas, with myself as co-supervisor. Thesis project: Morse-Theoretic Presentations for Bordism Bicategories. Filippos hails from Greece.

Graduated PhD students

• Nzaganya Nzaganya (2021–2023). PhD thesis : Coherent Loop States and their Applications in Geometric Quantization.

• Hosana Ranaivomanana, graduated April 2022. Thesis: Investigations on the Wigner Derivative and on an integral formula for the quantum 6j symbols. Hosana hails from Madagascar where she is the outreach manager of the Mamelasoa non-profit school. She is also a postdoctoral research fellow with the Mathematical Biology group at Stellenbosch.

• Gerrit Goosen. graduated April 2018. Thesis: Oriented 123-TQFTs via String-Nets and State-Sums. Gerrit hails from South Africa and is is a Lecturer in Mathematics at North-West University.

Graduated Stellenbosch MSc students

• Brian Muciri, graduated March 2024 (cum laude). Thesis: Canonical Connections in Riemannian and Hermitian Geometry.

• Nelson Kyakutwika, graduated December 2022 (cum laude). Thesis: Bayesian Forecasting of Stock Returns using Simultaneous Graphical Dynamical Linear Models.

• Hosana Ranaivomanana, graduated April 2019. Thesis: Euler classes and two-dimensional topological quantum field theories.

Previous Honours students at Stellenbosch

• Jordan Levin, 2018. Honours essay: The Parmesan Theorem and Groupoid Cohomology. Explains and fills in a number of details for the article: Willerton, The twisted Drinfeld double of a finite group via gerbes and finite groupoids.

Affiliate member of TQFT research group

• Shimal Harichurn. Shimal did his undergraduate at UKZN, and then started a MSc with me. Then he got a scholarship to go to Bonn in 2021 to do an MSc in Mathematics where he was jointly supervised by Sergei Gukov. Thesis: On Z-hat invariants and non-perturbative SL(2, C) Chern-Simons theory.

AIMS Structured Masters Essay students

• Hosana Ranaivomanana, 2017. The equivalence between two-dimensional topological quantum field theories and commutative Frobenius algebras.

• Ihechukwu Chinwere, Computer simulation of the modular fibration, May 2012.

• Michael Ajani, Fermionic integration and the Mathai-Quillen form, May 2010.

• Solomon Owerre, Maxwell’s equations in terms of differential forms, May 2010.

Undergraduate student projects

• Jan Louw, Visualizing the planar three body problem by stereographic projection, Oct 2014.