Dusa mcduff biography of martin

Margaret Cavendish. Margaret Capet d. Margaret Bernadotte —. Margaret Beatrice — Margaret Antoinette Clapp.

Dusa mcduff biography of martin

Margaret fl. Margaret d. Margaret c. Margaret E. Margaret I. Margaret I of Denmark — Margaret II. Many other honours have come her way, perhaps the most prestigious of which is her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in The citation for her election to the Fellowship read:- McDuff is best known for her work in the geometry of multi-dimensional structures.

Her work in symplectic geometry, functional analysis and diffeomorphism groups has provided understanding and unexpected results in a whole range of areas of great importance. Her work is based on a deep and wide mathematical understanding, and has opened an extraordinarily fertile new branch of mathematics. In addition to these honours McDuff has been invited to give many prestigious lectures.

Although her research contributions to mathematics have been truly outstanding, McDuff has given service to mathematics in many other ways. She has been involved in reform of undergraduate teaching at Stony Brook, is on the editorial board of Notices of the American Mathematical Society , and has been an active member of Women in Science and Engineering.

We give one further quote from her acceptance speech of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize concerning women in mathematics:- I think that there is quite an element of luck in the fact that I have survived as a mathematician. I also got real help from the feminist movement, both emotionally and practically. I think things are somewhat easier now: there is at least a little more institutional support of the needs of women and families, and there are more women in mathematics so that one need not be so isolated.

But I don't think that all the problems are solved. She has continued to receive prestigious awards such as honorary degrees from the University of Edinburgh and the University of York In the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society McDuff's important contributions which led to her honorary membership are described:- In the early eighties, shortly before Gromov 's work on pseudo-holomorphic curves began to move the subject in new directions, McDuff began her study of symplectic topology and geometry.

Among her early contributions to the field is a paper on the flux homomorphism and a celebrated theorem on the classification of rational and ruled symplectic 4 -manifolds. Among the many applications of this work is an important extension of Gromov 's non-squeezing theorem. Though McDuff had no specific plans [ 9 ] it turned out to be a profitable visit for her mathematically.

There, she met Israel Gelfand in Moscow who gave her a deeper appreciation of mathematics. 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 , 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 's topology lectures and was soon invited to teach at the University of York. In she separated from her husband, and was divorced in At this time a position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT opened up for her, reserved for visiting female mathematicians.

Her career as a mathematician developed further while at MIT , and soon she was accepted to the Institute for Advanced Study 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. Around this time she met mathematician John Milnor who was then based in Princeton University.

To live closer to him she took up an untenured assistant professorship at the Stony Brook University. She has since worked on symplectic topology. For the past 30 years McDuff has been a contributor to the development of the field of symplectic geometry and topology. She has also worked on embedding capacities of 4-dimensional symplectic ellipsoids with Felix Schlenk, [ 15 ] 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. McDuff was the first to be awarded the Satter Prize , in , for her work on symplectic geometry ; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society , a Noether Lecturer and a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition.

Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Barnard College. Research Interests. Membership Type Member.