Jeff Brock began playing jazz bass as a Yale College undergraduate with Vijay Iyer, performing as a duo routinely in the Saybrook College dining hall and with multiple ensembles around campus. He went on to extend this collaboration as the founding bassist of the Vijay Iyer Trio, with Brad Hargreaves on drums, while he and Iyer were graduate students at Berkeley. This group recorded with Steve Coleman, Liberty Ellman, and others. Brock also performed regularly in the Bay Area with Donald “Duck” Bailey’s octet “Eight Misbehavin’’” and with fellow math grad student Rob Schneiderman’s trio. He has since performed regularly in the Providence and Boston area, as his academic schedule permits.
Brock is an accomplished research mathematician, specializing in geometry and topology, focusing on William Thurston’s program to understand the geometry of 3-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds. His work led to their geometric classification, and to a new program to relate topology to effective geometric models for manifolds in dimension three. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He currently serves as the Dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale, and as the William S. Massey Professor of Mathematics.
