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Martin John Dunwoody (born November 3, 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 full 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.

From 1971 on several mathematicians have been working on Wall's conjecture, which said that all finitely generated groups were accessible. Dunwoody proved the 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.

[edit] External links

• home page of Martin Dunwoody.
• Martin Dunwoody at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

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