Dr. Ravi Fernando

 

Research areas: Algebraic geometry in characteristic p, heuristic and computational questions in number theory

Dr. Ravi Fernando is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Central Missouri. A Missouri native, he completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2023 under the supervision of Martin Olsson. He came to UCM in 2026 after a three-year postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has taught a number of undergraduate courses, including Calculus II, Differential Equations, Fundamental Mathematics (an introduction to proofs), Abstract Linear Algebra, and Berkeley's Putnam Exam seminar.

His Ph.D. research dealt with the saturated de Rham-Witt complex, an algebraic tool for studying the geometric and topological properties of an algebraic variety over a characteristic-p field. He is currently interested in relationships between the saturated de Rham-Witt complex of a singular variety and other topics in singularity theory.

Additionally, since 2019, Dr. Fernando has served as a mathematical advisor for the distributed computing project PrimeGrid, which searches for large prime numbers of various forms. In this capacity, he has conducted theoretical research on the prime divisors of Fermat numbers and supervised an undergraduate research project on software for finding long arithmetic progressions of primes.