Ciprian S. Borcea

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Ciprian S. Borcea is a professor of mathematics at Rider University, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He is an algebraic-geometer interested in applications of geometric models to protein flexibility, kinematics of linkages or periodic frameworks, and meta-material design.

In collaboration with Ileana Streinu, he is developing a condensed yet accessible book exposition of new geometrical results, techniques, and insights related to protein folding, robot kinematics, and auxetic behavior in crystalline or cellular materials, disclosing various analogies and structural characteristics.

Borcea earned a PhD from the University of Bucharest, in Romania, with a thesis on deformations of complex structures. He was a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, and proposed a method, now called the Borcea-Voisin construction, for obtaining mirror-symmetric families of Calabi-Yau threefolds. In collaborative work with Streinu and supported by National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants, he solved the maximum reach and workspace boundary problems for revolute-jointed robot arms. Recently, this collaboration uncovered the geometric underpinnings of periodic auxetics.