Julia Wolf is a British mathematician specialising in

arithmetic combinatorics In mathematics, arithmetic combinatorics is a field in the intersection of number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory and harmonic analysis. Scope Arithmetic combinatorics is about combinatorial estimates associated with arithmetic operations ...

who was the 2016 winner of the Anne Bennett Prize of the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh ...

. She is currently a professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

Education and career

Wolf writes that her childhood ambition was to become a

carpenter Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc. Carpenter ...

, and that she became attracted to science only after subscribing to ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' as a teenager. She read mathematics at

Clare College, Cambridge Clare College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college was founded in 1326 as University Hall, making it the second-oldest surviving college of the Unive ...

, completing the

Mathematical Tripos The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Origin In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was a di ...

in 2003. She remained at Cambridge for graduate study, and completed her PhD there in 2008. Her dissertation, ''Arithmetic Structure in Sets of Integers'', was supervised by

Timothy Gowers Sir William Timothy Gowers, (; born 20 November 1963) is a British mathematician. He is the holder of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, a director of research at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Camb ...

. She was also mentored in her doctoral studies by Ben Green, whom she met when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge from 2001 to 2005. Since earning her doctorate she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute The Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), is an independent nonprofit mathematical research institution on the University of California campus in Berkeley, Califor ...

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

, Triennial assistant professor at

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

, Hadamard associate professor at the

École Polytechnique (, ; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mat ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

(earning a

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

at the

University of Paris-Sud Paris-Sud University (), also known as the University of Paris — XI (or as the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, University of Paris before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, ...

in 2012), and Heilbronn reader in combinatorics and number theory at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

. She returned to Cambridge as a university lecturer in 2018, and was a Fellow of Clare College from 2018 to 2022.

Recognition

In 2016 the

gave Wolf their

Anne Bennett Prize The Anne Bennett Prize and Senior Anne Bennett Prize are awards given by the London Mathematical Society. In every third year, the society offers the Senior Anne Bennett prize to a mathematician normally based in the United Kingdom for work in, in ...

"in recognition of her outstanding contributions to

additive number theory Additive number theory is the subfield of number theory concerning the study of subsets of integers and their behavior under addition. More abstractly, the field of additive number theory includes the study of abelian groups and commutative semigro ...

, combinatorics and harmonic analysis and to the mathematical community." The award citation particularly cited her work with Gowers on counting solutions to

systems of linear equations In mathematics, a system of linear equations (or linear system) is a collection of two or more linear equations involving the same variables. For example, : \begin 3x+2y-z=1\\ 2x-2y+4z=-2\\ -x+\fracy-z=0 \end is a system of three equations in ...

over

abelian group In mathematics, an abelian group, also called a commutative group, is a group in which the result of applying the group operation to two group elements does not depend on the order in which they are written. That is, the group operation is commu ...

s, and her work on quadratic analogues of the Goldreich–Levin theorem.

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wolf, Julia Year of birth missing (living people) Living people British mathematicians British women mathematicians Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge Rutgers University faculty Academic staff of École Polytechnique Academics of the University of Bristol Cambridge mathematicians Fellows of Clare College, Cambridge