Sam Payne

Sam Payne (b. 1978), received his Ph.D. in April, 2006, under the direction of William Fulton at the University of Michigan. His thesis, "Toric vector bundles," gives a surprising and simple construction of complete toric varieties on which there are no nontrivial equivariant bundles of rank less than or equal to three. In other work, Payne gives counterexamples to conjectures of Fujino and of Hibi (with Mircea Mustata), while his paper "Equivariant Chow cohomology of toric varieties " gives a complete, elegant description of the equivariant Chow cohomology of toric varieties: it is the ring of integral piecewise polynomial functions.