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 The Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, also called the Satter Prize, is one of twenty-one prizes given out by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). It is presented biennially in recognition of an outstanding contribution to mathematics ...

, was a

Noether Lecture The Noether Lecture is a distinguished lecture series that honors women "who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences". The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) established the annual lectures in 1980 as t ...

r, and is a Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at

Barnard College Barnard College of Columbia University is a private women's liberal arts college in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1889 by a group of women led by young student activist Annie Nathan Meyer, who petitioned Columbia ...

Personal life and education

Margaret Dusa Waddington was born in London, England, on 18 October 1945 to

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian on the southern shore of t ...

architect

Margaret Justin Blanco White Margaret Justin Blanco White OBE ARIBA (11 December 1911 – 1 November 2001) was a Scottish architect. Early life and education Margaret Justin Blanco White was born at 30 Pembroke Square, Kensington, London, on 11 December 1911. Her father ...

, second wife of

biologist A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual Cell (biology), cell, a multicellular organism, or a Community (ecology), community of Biological inter ...

Conrad Hal Waddington Conrad Hal Waddington (8 November 1905 – 26 September 1975) was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developm ...

, her father. Her sister is the anthropologist

Caroline Humphrey Caroline Humphrey, Baroness Rees of Ludlow, (''née'' Waddington; born 1 September 1943) is a British anthropologist and academic. Biography Humphrey's father was the biologist Conrad H. Waddington. Her mother was her father's second wife, ar ...

, and she has an elder half-brother C. Jake Waddington by her father's first marriage. Her mother was the daughter of

Amber Reeves Amber Blanco White (' Reeves; 1 July 1887 – 26 December 1981) was a New Zealand-born British feminist writer and scholar. Early life Reeves was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of Fabian feminist Maud Pember Re ...

, the noted feminist, author and lover of

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

Genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

. McDuff was educated at St George's School for Girls in Edinburgh and, although the standard was lower than at the corresponding boys' school,

The Edinburgh Academy The Edinburgh Academy is an independent day school in Edinburgh, Scotland, which was opened in 1824. The original building, on Henderson Row in the city's New Town, is now part of the Senior School. The Junior School is located on Arboretum Roa ...

, McDuff had an exceptionally good mathematics teacher. 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.

Turning down a scholarship to the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

to stay with her boyfriend in

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...

, she enrolled at the

. She graduated with a BSc Hons in 1967, going on to

Girton College, Cambridge Girton College is one of the 31 constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge. The college was established in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon as the first women's college in Cambridge. In 1948, it was granted full college statu ...

as a doctoral student. Here, under the guidance of mathematician George A. Reid, McDuff worked on problems in

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (e.g. inner product, norm, topology, etc.) and the linear functions defined o ...

. She solved a problem on

Von Neumann algebra In mathematics, a von Neumann algebra or W*-algebra is a *-algebra of bounded operators on a Hilbert space that is closed in the weak operator topology and contains the identity operator. It is a special type of C*-algebra. Von Neumann algebra ...

s, constructing infinitely many different factors of type II₁, and published the work in the ''

Annals of Mathematics The ''Annals of Mathematics'' is a mathematical journal published every two months by Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. History The journal was established as ''The Analyst'' in 1874 and with Joel E. Hendricks as the ...

''. 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 David McDuff (born 1945, Sale, Cheshire, England) is a Scottish translator, editor and literary critic. Life McDuff attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German, gaining a PhD in 1971. He married mathematician Dus ...

, she left for a six-month visit to

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...

. Her husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky. Though McDuff had no specific plans it turned out to be a profitable visit for her mathematically. There, she met

Israel Gelfand Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, also written Israïl Moyseyovich Gel'fand, or Izrail M. Gelfand ( yi, ישראל געלפֿאַנד, russian: Изра́иль Моисе́евич Гельфа́нд, uk, Ізраїль Мойсейович Гел� ...

in Moscow who gave her a deeper appreciation of mathematics. McDuff later wrote:

y 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 Innokenty Annensky than that I had found infinitely many type II-sub-one factors, but then he proceeded to open my eyes to the world of mathematics. It was a wonderful education, in which reading
Pushkin Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (; rus, links=no, Александр Сергеевич ПушкинIn pre-Revolutionary script, his name was written ., r=Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsandr sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ ˈpuʂkʲɪn, ...
, 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'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!

On returning to Cambridge McDuff started attending

Frank Adams John Frank Adams (5 November 1930 – 7 January 1989) was a British mathematician, one of the major contributors to homotopy theory. Life He was born in Woolwich, a suburb in south-east London, and attended Bedford School. He began researc ...

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing ...

lectures and was soon invited to teach at the University of York. In 1975 she separated from her husband, and was divorced in 1978. At the University of York, she "essentially wrote a second PhD" while working with Graeme Segal. At this time a position at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) opened up for her, reserved for visiting female mathematicians. Her career as a mathematician developed further while at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, and soon she was accepted to the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

where she worked with Segal on the Atiyah–Segal completion theorem. She then returned to England, where she took up a lectureship at the

University of Warwick , mottoeng = Mind moves matter , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £7.0 million (2021) , budget = £698.2 million (2020� ...

. Around this time she met mathematician

John Milnor John Willard Milnor (born February 20, 1931) is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, algebraic K-theory and low-dimensional holomorphic dynamical systems. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook Univ ...

who was then based in

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

. To live closer to him she took up an untenured assistant professorship at the Stony Brook University. Now an independent mathematician, she began work on the relationship between

diffeomorphism In mathematics, a diffeomorphism is an isomorphism of smooth manifolds. It is an invertible function that maps one differentiable manifold to another such that both the function and its inverse are differentiable. Definition Given two ...

s and the classifying space for

foliation In mathematics (differential geometry), a foliation is an equivalence relation on an ''n''-manifold, the equivalence classes being connected, injectively immersed submanifolds, all of the same dimension ''p'', modeled on the decomposition of ...

s. She has since worked on

symplectic topology Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. Symplectic geometry has its origins in the Ha ...

. In the spring of 1985, McDuff attended the

Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques The Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS; English: Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics. It is located in Bures-sur-Yvette, jus ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

to study Mikhael Gromov's work on elliptic methods. Since 2007, she has held the Helen Lyttle Kimmel chair at

. In 1984 McDuff married Milnor, now a professor at Stony Brook University, and a Fields medallist, Wolf Prize winner and Abel Prize Laureate.Donald J. Albers &

Gerald L. Alexanderson Gerald Lee Alexanderson (1933–2020) was an American mathematician. He was the Michael & Elizabeth Valeriote Professor of Science at Santa Clara University, and in 1997–1998 was president of the Mathematical Association of America. He was also ...

(2011) ''Fascinating Mathematical People: interviews and memoirs'', "Dusa McDuff", pp 215–39,

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...

, L. Polterovich, "Focus on the scientist: Dusa McDuff"
/ref>

Work and research

For the past 30 years McDuff has been a contributor to the development of the field of symplectic geometry and

. She gave the first example of symplectic forms on a closed manifold that are cohomologous but not

diffeomorphic In mathematics, a diffeomorphism is an isomorphism of smooth manifolds. It is an invertible function that maps one differentiable manifold to another such that both the function and its inverse are differentiable. Definition Given two man ...

and also classified the rational and ruled symplectic four-manifolds, completed with François Lalonde. More recently, partly in collaboration with

Susan Tolman Susan Tolman is an American mathematician known for her work in symplectic geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at Illinois. Tolman earned her P ...

, she has studied applications of methods of

to the theory of Hamiltonian torus actions. She has also worked on embedding capacities of 4-dimensional symplectic ellipsoids with Felix Schlenk, which gives rise to some very interesting number-theoretical questions. It also indicates a connection between the combinatorics of J-holomorphic curves in the blow up of the projective plane and the numbers that appear as indices in embedded contact homology. With Katrin Wehrheim, she has challenged the foundational rigor of a classic proof in symplectic geometry. With Dietmar Salamon, she co-authored two textbooks ''Introduction to

Symplectic Topology Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. Symplectic geometry has its origins in the Ha ...

'' and ''J-Holomorphic Curves and Symplectic Topology''.

Honours and recognition

McDuff was the first to be awarded the Satter Prize, in 1991, for her work on symplectic geometry; she is a Fellow of the

(1994), a Noether Lecturer (1998) and a member of both the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

(1999) and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

(2013). In 2008 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was a Plenary Lecturer at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) and an Invited Speaker at the 1990 ICM. In 2012 she became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. In 1999, she was the first female Hardy Lecturer, an award from the London Mathematical Society. She is also a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

, and is part of the 2019 class of fellows of the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

. In 2010, she was awarded the

Senior Berwick Prize The Berwick Prize and Senior Berwick Prize are two prizes of the London Mathematical Society awarded in alternating years in memory of William Edward Hodgson Berwick, a previous Vice-President of the LMS. Berwick left some money to be given to the ...

of the London Mathematical Society. For 2017 she received, jointly with Dietmar Salamon, the AMS

Leroy P. Steele Prize The Leroy P. Steele Prizes are awarded every year by the American Mathematical Society, for distinguished research work and writing in the field of mathematics. Since 1993, there has been a formal division into three categories. The prizes have b ...

for Mathematical Exposition. In 2018 she received the

Sylvester Medal The Sylvester Medal is a bronze medal awarded by the Royal Society (London) for the encouragement of mathematical research, and accompanied by a £1,000 prize. It was named in honour of James Joseph Sylvester, the Savilian Professor of Geometry a ...

by the

.Sylvester Medal 2018
/ref>

References

External links

Agnes Scott College
Home page
an
Vita – Dusa McDuff
Stony Brooks Mathematics Department
Video interview
with McDuff at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques {{DEFAULTSORT:McDuff, Dusa 1945 births Living people 20th-century English mathematicians Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Academics of the University of Warwick Barnard College faculty English expatriates in the United States Cambridge mathematicians Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics Fellows of the Royal Society Female Fellows of the Royal Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Members of Academia Europaea People from Stony Brook, New York Stony Brook University faculty British women academics British expatriate academics Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 20th-century women mathematicians Members of the American Philosophical Society 21st-century English mathematicians Reeves family

Personal life and education

Work and research

Honours and recognition

References

Further reading

External links