Richard Douglas Canary (born in 1962) is an American mathematician working mainly on low-dimensional topology. He is a professor at the University of Michigan. Canary obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 under the supervision of William Paul Thurston, with the thesis Hyperbolic Structures on 3-Manifolds with Compressible Boundaries. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1993. In 2015 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, "for contributions to low-dimensional topology and hyperbolic geometry as well as for service and teaching in mathematics."