Math can be intimidating — unless your professor is Solomon Jekel - Northeastern University College of Science

Solomon Jekel has been at Northeastern University for 44 years. There’s a problem he’s been working on even longer.

“It’s such a challenge,” says the longtime mathematics professor, sitting in jeans and sneakers on the couch in his sunlit Boston office in Lake Hall. “Everything I’ve done since then has been because that has been too hard.”

Jekel’s academic specialty is differential topology. For a near half-century, he’s studied the dynamics of moving objects on three-dimensional surfaces. In pure math, these dynamics are called foliations, expressed through differential equations. Jekel’s earliest breakthrough, part of his Ph.D. work at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, involved using algebra (rather than geometry) to understand certain foliations. The findings were a big deal at the time, and published in the American Journal of Mathematics. As is typical of math, however, they led to even more questions.