Tuomas Orponen obtained his PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2012. He then did postdocs at the Universities of Edinburgh, Warwick and Helsinki, before being appointed to a tenure track at the University of Jyväskylä in 2020. Orponen’ fields of research are geometric measure theory, fractal geometry, and harmonic analysis. Most of his recent work is related to the following general “incidence” problem: how much can families of thin tubes interact with point sets in the plane, space, or more exotic geometries such as the Heisenberg group? Among the well-known open problems in Orponen’s field are the Kakeya conjecture (in dimensions 4 or higher), Falconer’s distance set conjecture, and the visibility conjecture (in dimensions 3 and higher).
