凯伦·乌伦贝克1942—

乌伦贝克凭借“她在几何偏微分方程，规范场论和可积系统方面的开创性成就，以及她在数学分析、几何学和数学物理方面的工作的基本影响”赢得了2019年的阿贝尔奖。她是第一位获该奖的女性。

生平

1942年出生于美国克利夫兰，1968年获得布兰戴斯大学的数学博士学位。2019年获阿贝尔奖，表彰她在偏微分方程、规范场论和可积系统方面的开创性成果，并且深刻影响了分析学、几何学和物理学。

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS (born August 24, 1942) is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.

Uhlenbeck was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007. She won the 2019 Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." She is the first, and so far only, woman to win the prize since its inception in 2003. She donated half of the prize money to organizations which promote more engagement of women and other minorities in research mathematics.

Life and career

Uhlenbeck was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to engineer Arnold Keskulla and schoolteacher and artist Carolyn Windeler Keskulla. While she was a child, the family moved to New Jersey. Uhlenbeck's maiden name, Keskulla, comes from Keskküla and from her grandfather who was Estonian, while her current surname is Dutch. Uhlenbeck received her B.A. (1964) from the University of Michigan. She began her graduate studies at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, and married biophysicist Olke C. Uhlenbeck (the son of physicist George Uhlenbeck) in 1965. When her husband went to Harvard, she moved with him and restarted her studies at Brandeis University, where she earned an MA (1966) and PhD (1968) under the supervision of Richard Palais.

Research

Uhlenbeck is one of the founders of the field of geometric analysis, a discipline that uses differential geometry to study the solutions to differential equations and vice versa. She has also contributed to topological quantum field theory and integrable systems.

Together with Jonathan Sacks in the early 1980s, Uhlenbeck established regularity estimates that have found applications to studies of the singularities of harmonic maps and the existence of smooth local solutions to the Yang–Mills–Higgs equations in gauge theory.[EMI][MIC][RSY] In particular, Simon Donaldson describes their joint 1981 paper The existence of minimal immersions of 2-spheres[EMI] as a "landmark paper...

Outreach

In 1991, Uhlenbeck co-founded, with Herbert Clemens and Dan Freed, the Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI) with the mission to "provide an immersive educational and professional development opportunity for several parallel communities from across the larger umbrella of the mathematics profession." Uhlenbeck also co-founded the Women and Mathematics Program at the Institute for Advanced Study "with the mission to recruit and retain more women in mathematics." British theoretical physicist and author Jim Al-Khalili describes Uhlenbeck as a "role model" for her work in promoting a career in mathematics to young people, particularly women.

Personal life

Uhlenbeck is a self-described "messy reader" and "messy thinker", with boxes of books stacked on her desk at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. In spontaneous remarks made to Institute colleagues after winning the Abel Prize in March 2019, Uhlenbeck noted that for lack of prominent female role models during her apprenticeship in the field of mathematics, she had instead emulated chef Julia Child: "She knew how to pick the turkey up off the floor and serve it".

Awards and honors

In March 2019, Uhlenbeck became the first woman to receive the Abel Prize, with the award committee citing the decision for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." Hans Munthe-Kaas, who chaired the award committee, stated that "Her theories have revolutionised our understanding of minimal surfaces, such as more general minimisation problems in higher dimensions". She donated half of the cash prize to two organizations, the EDGE Foundation (which subsequently set up the Karen EDGE Fellowship Program), and the Institute for Advanced Study's Women and Mathematics (WAM) Program.