Dusa McDuff

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Dusa McDuff, Edinburgh 2009

Dusa McDuff (born Margaret Dusa Waddington ; born October 18, 1945 in London ) is an English mathematician who mainly deals with functional analysis , symplectic geometry and topology .

Life

McDuff is the daughter of geneticist Conrad Hal Waddington and an architect. She went to school in Edinburgh and then to Edinburgh University , where she married as a student (she kept the last name McDuff from the marriage). After graduating in 1967, she went to Girton College at the University of Cambridge , where she did her doctorate in 1971 with George Reid with a thesis on Von Neumann algebras (she constructed an infinite number of different Von Neumann algebras of factor type II 1 ).

A stay in Moscow (1969), where she followed her husband, and an encounter there with Israel Gelfand and later lectures by Frank Adams in Cambridge aroused her interest in topology. Then she was a lecturer at the University of York (1973) and after a stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , she was a lecturer at the University of Warwick in 1976 , but took a post at Stony in 1978 Brook University to be closer to her future husband, John Milnor (Princeton).

From the beginning of the 1980s she dealt with symplectic topology, building on the methods of Mikhail Leonidowitsch Gromow ( pseudoholomorphic curves ), during which she stayed in 1985 at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) near Paris . In 1984 she received a full professorship in Stony Brook, where she was dean of the mathematics faculty from 1991 to 1993. With Dietmar Salamon she wrote the standard works “J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topology” (American Mathematical Society 2004, 2nd edition 2012) and “Introduction to symplectic topology” (Oxford University Press 1998).

McDuff received the 1991 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize from the American Mathematical Society (AMS), of which she is a fellow. In 1995 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1999 the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and in 1994 a member of the Royal Society in London. In 1998 she gave the Noether Lecture . In 1998 she gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Berlin ( Fibrations in symplectic topology ) and in 1996 she gave one of the plenary lectures at the second European Congress of Mathematicians in Budapest ( Recent Progress in Symplectic Topology ). In 1990 she was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyōto ( Symplectic 4-manifolds ). In 2010 she received the Senior Berwick Prize . In 2014 she will give the AMS Colloquium Lecture . For 2017 she received the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for her book with Dietmar Salamon J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topology . In 2006/07 and 2007/08 she was on the Abel Prize Committee . She has been an external member of the Academia Europaea since 2014, and for 2018 she would be awarded the New Year's Eve Medal .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ McDuff: Uncountably many II1 factors. Ann. of Math., Vol. 90, 1996, pp. 372-377. Murray and von Neumann had found two II1 factors and shortly before their dissertation a third had been found.
  2. ↑ According to McDuff, her Gelfand opened up many areas of mathematics. See also her article in the obituary on Gelfand, Notices AMS, February 2013, Online
  3. ↑ 2017 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, Gerald L. Alexanderson Fascinating Mathematical People: Interviews and Memoirs , Princeton University Press 2011

Web links

personal data
SURNAME McDuff, Dusa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH London