Ralph Morrison

Ralph Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He completed his PhD under the guidance of Bernd Sturmfels at UC Berkeley in 2015, and spent a year as a postdoc at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden. Ralph does research in tropical geometry, which is a discretized, combinatorial version of algebraic geometry. He spends a lot of time splitting polygons up into triangles and then drawing dual tropical curves, which are piece-wise linear versions of algebraic curves. Sometimes he forgets the geometry all together, and replaces the tropical curves with graphs. In that setting, he studies chip-firing games, and graph theoretic versions of algebro-geometric ideas like genus and gonality.

Ralph was a visitor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Spring 2020, working with Michael Joswig and members of his research group. He presented research talks both at TU Berlin and in MPI's inaugural Nonlinear Algebra Seminar Online.

When he's not doing mathematics, Ralph likes to go for runs, catch Pokémon, participate in pub quizzes, and play games like Dominion and DND. Having grown up in Kentucky, he does his very best to spread mint juleps and other bourbon-based beverages to every corner of the globe.