Ralph Morrison

Ralph Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He completed his PhD under Bernd Sturmfels at UC Berkeley in 2015, followed by a postdoc at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden.

• Education:
  • PhD in Mathematics from UC Berkeley (2015)
  • Postdoctoral work at KTH, Stockholm

Ralph specializes in tropical geometry, a combinatorial version of algebraic geometry. His research involves splitting polygons into triangles, studying dual tropical curves (piecewise-linear analogs of algebraic curves), and translating algebro-geometric concepts like genus and gonality into graph-theoretic frameworks. He also explores chip-firing games on graphs.

He was a visitor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Spring 2020, collaborating with Michael Joswig's research group and presenting talks at TU Berlin and the Nonlinear Algebra Seminar Online.

Outside academia, Ralph enjoys running, Pokémon, pub quizzes, and card games like Dominion and DND. As a Kentucky native, he advocates for mint juleps and bourbon-based beverages globally.