Dusa McDuff
Dusa McDuff | |
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Born | Margaret Dusa Waddington 18 October 1945 London, England |
Alma mater | University of Edinburgh Girton College, Cambridge |
Spouses | |
Parents |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Cambridge University of York University of Warwick Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study Stony Brook University Barnard College |
Doctoral advisor | George A. Reid[3] |
Doctoral students | Katrin Wehrheim |
Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE (born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics,[4] was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.[5]
Personal life and education
Margaret Dusa Waddington was born in London, England, on 18 October 1945 to
I always wanted to be a mathematician (apart from a time when I was eleven when I wanted to be a farmer's wife), and assumed that I would have a career, but I had no idea how to go about it: I didn't realize that the choices which one made about education were important and I had no idea that I might experience real difficulties and conflicts in reconciling the demands of a career with life as a woman.[8]
Turning down a scholarship to the University of Cambridge to stay with her boyfriend in Scotland, she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh.[7] She graduated with a BSc Hons in 1967, going on to Girton College, Cambridge as a doctoral student. Here, under the guidance of mathematician George A. Reid, McDuff worked on problems in functional analysis. She solved a problem on Von Neumann algebras, constructing infinitely many different factors of type II1, and published the work in the Annals of Mathematics.
After completing her doctorate in 1971 McDuff was appointed to a two-year Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cambridge. Following her husband, the literary translator David McDuff, she left for a six-month visit to Moscow. Her husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky. Though McDuff had no specific plans[9] it turned out to be a profitable visit for her mathematically. There, she met Israel Gelfand in Moscow who gave her a deeper appreciation of mathematics.[7][8] McDuff later wrote:
[My collaboration with him]... was not planned: it happened that his was the only name which came to mind when I had to fill out a form in the Inotdel office. The first thing that Gel'fand told me was that he was much more interested in the fact that my husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet
Mozart and Salieri played as important a role as learning about Lie groups or reading Cartan and Eilenberg. Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which he could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fandfound hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!
On returning to Cambridge McDuff started attending
Around this time she met mathematician
In 1984 McDuff married Milnor, now a professor at
Work and research
For the past 30 years McDuff has been a contributor to the development of the field of symplectic geometry and
With Dietmar Salamon, she co-authored two textbooks Introduction to Symplectic Topology[17] and J-Holomorphic Curves and Symplectic Topology.[18][19]
Honours and recognition
McDuff was the first to be awarded the
In 2010, she was awarded the
References
- ^ "BMS Morning Speakers −2012". Retrieved 30 November 2012.
- ^ "BMC Plenary Speaker". Retrieved 30 November 2012.
- ^ Dusa McDuff at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ "Browse Prizes and Awards". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 6 November 2020.
- ^ "Dusa McDuff | Barnard College". barnard.edu. Retrieved 16 August 2022.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-19-954088-4.
- ^ a b c "Biographies of Women Mathematicians: Dusa McDuff". Retrieved 5 December 2012.
- ^ a b "University of St. Andrews: Dusa McDuff". Archived from the original on 20 September 2011. Retrieved 30 November 2012.
- ^ a b c "Dusa McDuff: Some Autobiographical Notes". Stony Brook University. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-691-14829-8
- ^ McDuff, Dusa. "Symplectic Structures – A New Approach to Geometry". Association of Women Mathematicians. Archived from the original on 6 January 2014. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
- ^ a b L. Polterovich, "Focus on the scientist: Dusa McDuff"
- ^ "Université de Montréal Département de mathématiques et de statistique: Lalonde, Francois". Université de MontréalDépartement de mathématiques et de statistique. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
- ^ "Susan Tolman". UIUC. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
- ^ "Felix Schlenk". Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
- ^ Hartnett, Kevin (9 February 2017), "A Fight to Fix Geometry's Foundations: When two mathematicians raised pointed questions about a classic proof that no one really understood, they ignited a years-long debate about how much could be trusted in a new kind of geometry", Quanta.
- ^ Introduction to Symplectic Topology, 2nd edition, Oxford U. Press
- .
- . J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topology is a greatly expanded rewriting of the 1994 book J-holomorphic curves and quantum cohomology.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 17 March 2021.
- ^ "Professor Dusa Margaret McDuff FRS CorrFRSE FAAAS - The Royal Society of Edinburgh". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
- ^ McDuff, Dusa (1998). "Fibrations in symplectic topology". Doc. Math. (Bielefeld) Extra Vol. ICM Berlin, 1998, vol. I. pp. 339–357.
- ^ McDuff, Dusa (1990). "Symplectic 4-manifolds". Proceedings of the ICM, 1990, Kyoto.
- ^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 4 February 2013.
- ^ "List of recent Hardy Lecturers". London Mathematical Society. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
- ^ Member profile: Dusa McDuff, Academia Europaea, retrieved 22 September 2015.
- ^ 2019 Class of AWM Fellows, Association for Women in Mathematics, retrieved 8 January 2019
- ^ "List of LMS prize winners". London Mathematical Society. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
- ^ AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition
- ^ Sylvester Medal 2018
Further reading
- Speech delivered to the American Mathematics Society, Jan. 1991, in San Francisco, on the occasion of receiving the Satter Prize Archived 10 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine