All teaching materials are available on Canvas. If you have any questions, do please email me at

shane dot orourke1@ mtu dot ie.

where you replace the word 'dot' by an actual dot. (Similarly, if Shane MacGowan was an MTU lecturer, his email address would probably be shane.macgowan@mtu.ie.) Please include the relevant module code in the subject of your email.

My area of research is geometric group theory, particularly group actions on treelike objects.

Some papers

• Some free actions on non-archimedean trees  Journal of Group Theory (2004), no. 2, 275-286. (with  A. Martino)
• Free actions on Z^n-trees: a survey Contemp. Math. 372 (2005) 11-25. (with  A. Martino)
• The equation x^py^q=z^r and groups that act freely on Lambda-trees Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 361 (2009), no. 1, 223-236. (with  N. Brady,  L. Ciobanu and  A. Martino)
• Affine actions on non-archimedean trees Int. J. Alg. and Comput. 23 (2013), no. 2, 217-253.
• A tree-free group that is not orderable Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 143 (2015), no. 1, 41-43.
• A combination theorem for affine tree-free groups Int. J. Alg. and Comput. 26 (2016), no. 7, 1283-1321.
• Affine structures, wreath products and free affine actions on linear non-archimedean trees Journal of Lie Theory. 32 (2022), no. 1, 157-174. (Previous working title: Free affine actions on linear Lambda-trees)

Some resources

• Brian Bowditch's course
• Clara Löh's course
• Jon McCammond's Geometric Group Theory page and especially his
• List of people in Geometric Group Theory and his
• List of Geometric Group Theory Conferences
• List of online maths talks
• MathOverflow.
• ArXiv: Group Theory.
• ArXiv: Geometric Topology.