Martin John Dunwoody (born 3 November 1938) is an emeritus professor of Mathematics at the University of Southampton, England. He earned his PhD in 1964 from the Australian National University. He held positions at the University of Sussex before becoming a professor at the University of Southampton in 1992. He has been emeritus professor since 2003. Dunwoody works on geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. He is a leading expert in splittings and accessibility of discrete groups, groups acting on graphs and trees, JSJ-decompositions, the topology of 3-manifolds and the structure of their fundamental groups. Since 1971 several mathematicians have been working on Wall's conjecture, posed by Wall in a 1971 paper, which said that all finitely generated groups are accessible. Roughly, this means that every finitely generated group can be constructed from finite and one-ended groups via a finite number of amalgamated free products and HNN extensions over finite subgroups. In view of the Stallings theorem about ends of groups, one
Martin John Dunwoody (nacido el 3 de noviembre de 1938) es un profesor emérito de matemáticas en la Universidad de Southampton, Inglaterra. Ganó su doctorado en 1964 de la Universidad Nacional Australiana. Ocupó puestos en la Universidad de Sussex antes de convertirse en profesor en la Universidad de Southampton en 1992. Ha sido profesor emérito desde 2003. Dunwoody trabaja en teoría de grupos geométricos y topología de bajas dimensiones. Es un experto líder en divisiones y accesibilidad de grupos discretos, grupos que actúan en gráficos y árboles, JSJ-decomposiciones, la topología de 3-manifolds y la estructura de sus grupos fundamentales. Desde 1971 varios matemáticos han estado trabajando en la conjetura de Wall, planteada por Wall en un artículo de 1971, que dijo que todos los grupos finitamente generados son accesibles.