Silksong, Manifolds, and Jazz: New Tenure Track Professor Chris Kottke Profiled

Chris Kottke is one of the many new professors hired this year, and holds a tenure-track position in the math department. Kottke did his undergraduate degree at Tufts University, and then went to Berklee College of Music between undergrad and grad school, where he went to MIT before doing a postdoc at Northeastern. Leaving Boston, he got his first tenure track job at New College of Florida where he was at from 2016 to 2025, before starting at Reed this year. 

Kottke describes New College as having a “Reed-like student profile,” attracting “very intellectually curious students who were non-conformists with quirky interests,” and, until recently, it was a “haven for queer students in Florida.” Unfortunately, this made the school a target for politicians in Florida, including governor Ron DeSantis, who “decided to make an example out of it and took it over in 2023 by taking over the Board of Trustees, who then replaced the president.” Kottke describes a “big loss of shared governance” at the college and a “very different kind of profile of students.” Kottke notes how “at Reed, it's very clear that faculty really have ultimate control of the curriculum” and “a really strong hand in hiring faculty, ...two things that got really lost at New College.” 

Kottke sees Portland as a “good fit” for his interests, and “[likes] Portland a lot. I mean, I grew up in Colorado, the mountains and the environment is appealing to me. I was never really much of a beach person, despite being in a place with some of the best beaches in the country.” Kottke is excited about spending time outdoors in the Pacific Northwest, and as a longtime hiker and rock climber, he is excited to see that Portland’s rock climbing scene is much more prominent than Florida’s. 

At the Berklee College of Music, Kottke developed an affinity for jazz music. He also plays the trumpet, and honed his practice in Florida. As a result, he is “looking forward to getting kind of involved in the jazz scene in Portland at some point.”

Kottke also describes himself as the “family cook” back at home, spending his nights making dinner for his family. He has two children, an 11 and an eight-year-old. His kids are “super into video games,” and he enjoys playing with them on the family Nintendo Switch, which Kottke also plays on his own when he finds the time. His favorite game is evident from his laptop, which features a sticker of the character Hornet, the protagonist of 2025 indie platformer game Hollow Knight: Silksong, released a little over a week ago on September 4, 2025. Kottke grew up with a Super Nintendo and its many 2D platformer games, making his discovery of Hollow Knight (Silksong’s prequel) “in [his] wheelhouse.” As he was teaching Math 321: Real Analysis on its release day, this inspired an in-class “question of the day” where he asked the class about their favorite game (video game or otherwise). 

Kottke works in an area he describes as “the intersection of analysis and geometry and topology with some input from physics.” He studies problems that arise in physics that are of particular interest to mathematicians, such as magnetic monopoles. From a physicist’s point of view, magnetic monopoles are merely a hypothetical. Classical understandings of physics such as Gauss’s law for magnetism–which says that the net magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero–suggest that no magnetic monopoles could exist. However, the development of quantum mechanics and work by Pierre Curie and Paul Dirac has suggested that magnetic monopoles could exist, but physicists have not been able to replicate them in experiments so far. 

To a mathematician like Kottke, magnetic monopoles are simply “solutions to some equation you can write down that has independent geometric interest.” Kottke looks at the space of all solutions to magnetic monopoles, which he explains “has this really rich and interesting geometry, which is called the Hyperkähler geometry.” 

Magnetic monopoles are an example of the “deep relationship between physics and math, but especially geometry” where Kottke’s work lies. As he explains, often “physicists discover things that sort of should be true in mathematics long before the mathematicians get there ... there’s a big industry of taking these assertions of physicists, turning them into math conjectures, and then trying to understand what's going on there.”

Kottke is currently teaching Math 321: Real Analysis and will be teaching Math 311: Complex Analysis and Math 202: Vector Calculus in the spring. His approach to teaching is to “get a sense of who is in the class, where is everybody at, and where do we want to go?” He explains that 321 is “a bit more lecture-based than [his teaching style]” since it is his first experience teaching at Reed and a required course for the major. Instead, he often prefers “a kind of active learning, interactive type of thing, where I have a pretty good sense of where everybody's at and we can tailor things to that.” In 311, he plans to do an “inquiry-based learning style” with no textbook or lectures, instead making the class a “series of theorems and problems that the students will complete and then present in class.”

In the future, Kottke would enjoy teaching a topics course in either geometry or analysis, and would love to cover distribution theory, which is an area of math that can help solve difficult partial differential equations, in a Topics in Analysis course. Kottke could see himself teaching many different areas of geometry, such as manifolds or differential geometry.