Abel Prize: American professor is first woman to win prestigious math award
Source: Associated Press
Abel Prize: American professor is first woman to win prestigious math award
Associated Press
Tue 19 Mar 2019 15.55 GMT Last modified on Tue 19 Mar 2019 16.07 GMT
An American professor has become the first woman to be awarded the Abel Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious international mathematics awards.
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced in Oslo on Tuesday that Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck of the University of Texas at Austin was this year’s winner of the prize, seen by many as the Nobel Prize in mathematics.
The award was worth 6m Norwegian kroner ($704,000).
The jury cited Keskulla Uhlenbeck’s “fundamental work in geometric analysis and gauge theory which has dramatically changed the mathematical landscape”. It also praised her as “a strong advocate for gender equality in science and mathematics”.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/19/american-professor-first-woman-wins-abel-prize-math
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Source: Nature
19 MARCH 2019
Soap-bubble pioneer is first woman to win prestigious maths prize
Abel-prize winner Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck built bridges between analysis, geometry and physics.
Davide Castelvecchi
US mathematician Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck has won the 2019 Abel Prize — one of the field’s most prestigious awards — for her wide-ranging work in analysis, geometry and mathematical physics. Uhlenbeck is the first woman to win the 6-million-kroner (US$702,500) prize, which is given out by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, since it was first awarded in 2003.
Uhlenbeck learnt that she had won on 17 March, after a friend called and told her that the academy was trying to contact her. “I was completely amazed,” she told Nature. “It was totally out of the blue.” The academy announced the award on 19 March.
Uhlenbeck is legendary for her skill with partial differential equations, which link variable quantities and their rates of change, and are at the heart of most physical laws. But her long career has stretched across many fields, and she has used the equations to solve problems in geometry and topology.
One of her most influential results — and the one that she says she’s most proud of — is the discovery of a phenomenon called bubbling, as part of seminal work she did with mathematician Jonathan Sacks1. Sacks and Uhlenbeck were studying ‘minimal surfaces’, the mathematical theory of how soap films arrange themselves into shapes that minimize their energy. But the theory had been marred by the appearance of points at which energy appeared to become infinitely concentrated. Uhlenbeck’s insight was to ‘zoom in’ on those points to that this were caused by a new bubble splitting off the surface.
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Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00932-1