Dusa McDuff

Dusa McDuff ( born Margaret Dusa Waddington, born October 18, 1945 in London) is an English mathematician who is mainly concerned with functional analysis, symplectic geometry and topology.

Life

McDuff is the daughter of Conrad Hal Waddington geneticist and an architect. She went to school in Edinburgh and then to the University of Edinburgh, where she married her as a student ( from the marriage she retained the surname McDuff ). After graduating in 1967 she went to Girton College, Cambridge, where she in 1971 with a thesis on von Neumann algebras doctorate ( they constructed an infinite variety of von Neumann algebras of type II1 factor ). A stay in Moscow, where she followed her husband, and a local meeting with Israel Gelfand and subsequent lectures by Frank Adams in Cambridge awakened her interest in topology. After that, she was a lecturer at the University of York (1973) and after a stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1976 she was a lecturer at the University of Warwick, but took a job in 1978 at Stony Brook University to be closer to her future husband John Milnor ( Princeton ) to be at.

From the early 1980s, she worked on symplectic topology, where she built on methods of Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov ( pseudoholomorphic curves), in which they at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques ( IHES ) resided in 1985 at Paris. In 1984 she was awarded a full professorship at Stony Brook, where she was from 1991 to 1993 dean of the mathematics department. With Dietmar Salamon they wrote the standard works " J- holomorphic curves and symplectic topology" (American Mathematical Society 2004) and "Introduction to symplectic topology" (Oxford University Press 1998).

McDuff was Ruth Lyttle Satter 1991 the price of the American Mathematical Society ( AMS ), the fellow she is. In 1995 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999 National Academy of Sciences of the United States and in 1994 a member of the Royal Society in London. In 1998, she held the Noether Lecture. In 1998 she gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Berlin ( fibrations in symplectic topology ) and 1996 she held one of the plenary on the second European Congress of Mathematicians in Budapest ( Recent Progress in Symplectic Topology ). In 1990 she was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto ( Symplectic 4- manifolds ). In 2010 she was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize. 2014, it will hold the Colloquium Lecture of the AMS.