Porter Morgan

I'm a sixth year Math PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, advised by İnanç Baykur. I study low-dimensional topology, specifically 4-manifolds. I'm interested in Lefschetz fibrations, nonorientable 4-manifolds, and exotic smooth structures.

Contact: [email protected]

Papers and preprints:

• Irreducible 4-manifolds with order two fundamental group and even intersection form. Joint with Mihail Arabadji. Submitted (2025). [PDF]
• On nonorientable 4-manifolds. Joint with R. İnanç Baykur. To appear in Mathematical Research Letters (2025). [PDF]
• Irreducible 4-manifolds with order two fundamental group. Joint with Mihail Arabadji. Submitted (2025). [PDF]
• Belted sum decompositions of fully augmented links. With Brian Ransom, Dean Spyropoulos, Rolland Trapp, and Cameron Ziegler. New York J. Math, 31 (2025):1-42, 2024. [PDF]

Recent and upcoming activity:

• March 2026: speaking at the Special Session on Topology, Gauge Theory, and Special Geometric Structures at the AMS Spring Sectional in Boston.
• March 2026: attending the Simons Collaboration on New Structures in Low-Dimensional Topology Annual Meeting.
• February 2026: Speaking at the Dartmouth Topology Seminar.
• February 2026: speaking at the Rice Topology Seminar.
• January 2026: speaking at the Geometric Group Theory and Topology Seminar at Tufts.
• September 2025: speaking at the Princeton Topology Seminar.

Some other stuff about me:

• I love to cook, and maintain an active food blog, which I built using the Django framework. Front-end for the blog is a work in progress...
• I have a Github page, where you can find some other web development projects. My math research is also up there, but that stuff's top-secret, so those repositories are private.
• Other hobbies include playing billiards, cheering for the Detroit Lions, and walking my dog on the beach.