John Luecke

John Edwin Luecke is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UT Austin in 1985 under the supervision of Cameron Gordon.

Luecke specializes in topology, with a focus on knot theory and 3-manifolds. In 1987, along with Marc Culler, Cameron Gordon, and Peter Shalen, he co-authored a paper that introduced the cyclic surgery theorem. In 1989, Luecke and Gordon proved that knots are determined by their complements, a result now known as the Gordon–Luecke theorem.

Throughout his career, Luecke has received several honors, including a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1992 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1994. In 2012, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Luecke specializes in topology, with a focus on knot theory and 3-manifolds.