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Dusa McDuff

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Dusa McDuff
FRS
Photograph of Dusa McDuff, Edinburgh 2009
Dusa McDuff,Edinburgh2009 (80th Birthday ofMichael Atiyah)
Born
Margaret Dusa Waddington

(1945-10-18)18 October 1945(age 78)
London, England
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh
Girton College, Cambridge
Spouses
​
​
(m.1968;div.1978)​
​
(m.1984)​
Parents
AwardsBMS Morning Speaker[1]
Satter Prize(1991)
Fellow of the Royal Society
Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh(2008)
Speaker atInternational Congress of Mathematicians
BMC Plenary Speaker[2]
Sylvester Medal(2018)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Cambridge
University of York
University of Warwick
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Institute for Advanced Study
Stony Brook University
Barnard College
Doctoral advisorGeorge A. Reid[3]
Doctoral studentsKatrin Wehrheim

Dusa McDuffFRSCorrFRSE(born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works onsymplectic geometry.She was the first recipient of theRuth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics,[4]was aNoether Lecturer,and is a Fellow of theRoyal Society.She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics atBarnard College.[5]

Personal life and education[edit]

Margaret Dusa Waddington was born in London, England, on 18 October 1945 toEdinburgharchitectMargaret Justin Blanco White,second wife ofbiologistConrad Hal Waddington,her father.[6]Her sister is the anthropologistCaroline Humphrey,and she has an elder half-brother C. Jake Waddington by her father's first marriage. Her mother was the daughter ofAmber Reeves,the noted feminist, author and lover ofH. G. Wells.McDuff grew up in Scotland where her father was Professor ofGeneticsat theUniversity of Edinburgh.McDuff was educated atSt George's Schoolfor Girls in Edinburgh and, although the standard was lower than at the corresponding boys' school,The Edinburgh Academy,McDuff had an exceptionally good mathematics teacher.[7]She writes:

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 theUniversity of Cambridgeto stay with her boyfriend inScotland,she enrolled at theUniversity of Edinburgh.[7]She graduated with a BSc Hons in 1967, going on toGirton College, Cambridgeas a doctoral student. Here, under the guidance of mathematician George A. Reid, McDuff worked on problems infunctional analysis.She solved a problem onVon Neumann algebras,constructing infinitely many different factors of type II1,and published the work in theAnnals 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 translatorDavid McDuff,she left for a six-month visit toMoscow.Her husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poetInnokenty Annensky.Though McDuff had no specific plans[9]it turned out to be a profitable visit for her mathematically. There, she metIsrael Gelfandin 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 poetInnokenty Annenskythan that I had found infinitely manytype II-sub-one factors,but then he proceeded to open my eyes to the world of mathematics. It was a wonderful education, in which readingPushkin,MozartandSalieriplayed as important a role as learning aboutLie groupsor readingCartanandEilenberg.Gel'fandamazed 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, butGel'fandfound hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!

On returning to Cambridge McDuff started attendingFrank Adams'stopologylectures and was soon invited to teach at theUniversity of York.In 1975 she separated from her husband, and was divorced in 1978.[6][10]At the University of York, she "essentially wrote a second PhD"[9]while working withGraeme Segal.At this time a position atMassachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) opened up for her, reserved for visiting female mathematicians. Her career as a mathematician developed further while atMIT,and soon she was accepted to theInstitute for Advanced Studywhere she worked with Segal on theAtiyah–Segal completion theorem.She then returned to England, where she took up a lectureship at theUniversity of Warwick.[11]

Around this time she met mathematicianJohn Milnorwho was then based inPrinceton University.To live closer to him she took up an untenured assistant professorship at theStony Brook University.[9]Now an independent mathematician, she began work on the relationship betweendiffeomorphismsand the classifying space forfoliations.She has since worked onsymplectic topology.In the spring of 1985, McDuff attended theInstitut des Hautes Études ScientifiquesinParisto studyMikhael Gromov'swork on elliptic methods. Since 2007, she has held the Helen Lyttle Kimmel chair atBarnard College.

In 1984 McDuff married Milnor, now a professor atStony Brook University,and aFields medallist,Wolf Prize winnerandAbel PrizeLaureate.[6][10][12]

Work and research[edit]

For the past 30 years McDuff has been a contributor to the development of the field of symplectic geometry andtopology.She gave the first example of symplectic forms on a closed manifold that arecohomologousbut notdiffeomorphicand also classified the rational and ruled symplectic four-manifolds, completed withFrançois Lalonde.[13]More recently, partly in collaboration withSusan Tolman,[14]she has studied applications of methods of symplectic topology to the theory of Hamiltonian torus actions. She has also worked on embedding capacities of 4-dimensional symplecticellipsoidswith Felix Schlenk,[15]which gives rise to some very interesting number-theoretical questions. It also indicates a connection between thecombinatoricsofJ-holomorphic curvesin the blow up of the projective plane and the numbers that appear as indices inembedded contact homology.[10][12]WithKatrin Wehrheim,she has challenged the foundational rigor of a classic proof insymplectic geometry.[16]

WithDietmar Salamon,she co-authored two textbooksIntroduction to Symplectic Topology[17]andJ-Holomorphic Curves and Symplectic Topology.[18][19]

Honours and recognition[edit]

McDuff was the first to be awarded theSatter Prize,in 1991, for her work onsymplectic geometry;she is a Fellow of theRoyal Society(1994), aNoether Lecturer(1998) and a member of both theUnited States National Academy of Sciences(1999) and theAmerican Philosophical Society(2013).[20]In 2008 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of theRoyal Society of Edinburgh.[21]She was a Plenary Lecturer at the 1998International Congress of Mathematicians(ICM)[22]and an Invited Speaker at the 1990 ICM.[23]In 2012 she became a fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society.[24]In 1999, she was the first female Hardy Lecturer, an award from theLondon Mathematical Society.[25]She is also a member of theAcademia Europaea,[26] and is part of the 2019 class of fellows of theAssociation for Women in Mathematics.[27]

In 2010, she was awarded theSenior Berwick Prizeof theLondon Mathematical Society.[28]For 2017 she received, jointly with Dietmar Salamon, the AMSLeroy P. Steele Prizefor Mathematical Exposition.[29]In 2018 she received theSylvester Medalby theRoyal Society.[30]

References[edit]

  1. ^"BMS Morning Speakers −2012".Retrieved30 November2012.
  2. ^"BMC Plenary Speaker".Retrieved30 November2012.
  3. ^Dusa McDuffat theMathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^"Browse Prizes and Awards".American Mathematical Society.Retrieved6 November2020.
  5. ^"Dusa McDuff | Barnard College".barnard.edu.Retrieved16 August2022.
  6. ^abc"McDuff, Prof. (Margaret) Dusa".Who's who.Oxford: Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U25578.ISBN978-0-19-954088-4.
  7. ^abc"Biographies of Women Mathematicians: Dusa McDuff".Retrieved5 December2012.
  8. ^ab"University of St. Andrews: Dusa McDuff".Archived fromthe originalon 20 September 2011.Retrieved30 November2012.
  9. ^abc"Dusa McDuff: Some Autobiographical Notes".Stony Brook University.Retrieved5 December2012.
  10. ^abcDonald J. Albers &Gerald L. Alexanderson(2011)Fascinating Mathematical People: interviews and memoirs,"Dusa McDuff", pp 215–39,Princeton University Press,ISBN978-0-691-14829-8
  11. ^McDuff, Dusa."Symplectic Structures – A New Approach to Geometry".Association of Women Mathematicians.Archived fromthe originalon 6 January 2014.Retrieved5 December2012.
  12. ^abL. Polterovich, "Focus on the scientist: Dusa McDuff"
  13. ^"Université de Montréal Département de mathématiques et de statistique: Lalonde, Francois".Université de MontréalDépartement de mathématiques et de statistique.Retrieved5 December2012.
  14. ^"Susan Tolman".UIUC.Retrieved5 December2012.
  15. ^"Felix Schlenk".Mathematics Genealogy Project.Retrieved5 December2012.
  16. ^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.
  17. ^Introduction to Symplectic Topology,2nd edition, Oxford U. Press
  18. ^Eliashberg, Yakov(2007)."Review:J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topologyby Dusa McDuff and Dietmar Salamon "(PDF).Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.).44(2): 309–315.doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-06-01132-3.
  19. ^Lalond, François (1996)."Review:J-holomorphic curves and quantum cohomologyby Dusa McDuff and Dietmar Salamon "(PDF).Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.).33(3): 385–394.doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-96-00668-4.J-holomorphic curves and symplectic topologyis a greatly expanded rewriting of the 1994 bookJ-holomorphic curves and quantum cohomology.
  20. ^"APS Member History".search.amphilsoc.org.Retrieved17 March2021.
  21. ^"Professor Dusa Margaret McDuff FRS CorrFRSE FAAAS - The Royal Society of Edinburgh".The Royal Society of Edinburgh.Retrieved28 January2018.
  22. ^McDuff, Dusa (1998)."Fibrations in symplectic topology".Doc. Math. (Bielefeld) Extra Vol. ICM Berlin, 1998, vol. I.pp. 339–357.
  23. ^McDuff, Dusa (1990). "Symplectic 4-manifolds".Proceedings of the ICM, 1990, Kyoto.
  24. ^List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society,retrieved 4 February 2013.
  25. ^"List of recent Hardy Lecturers".London Mathematical Society.Retrieved17 January2018.
  26. ^Member profile: Dusa McDuff,Academia Europaea,retrieved22 September2015.
  27. ^2019 Class of AWM Fellows,Association for Women in Mathematics,retrieved8 January2019
  28. ^"List of LMS prize winners".London Mathematical Society.Retrieved17 January2018.
  29. ^AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition
  30. ^Sylvester Medal 2018

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

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