Karen Uhlenbeck
Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ( born August 24, 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American mathematician who deals with partial differential equations.
Life
Uhlenbeck grew up in New Jersey and studied physics at the University of Michigan, but then switched to mathematics and made her bachelor's degree in 1964. She then studied at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, interrupted, however, because of her marriage her studies. In 1966 she received her master's degree at Brandeis University, where she received her doctorate in Richard Palais 1968 ( The Calculus of Variations and Global Analysis). In 1968, she was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) and then two years at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1971 to 1976 at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Then she went to the University of Chicago, where she received a full professorship in 1983. In 1988, she went to the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the " Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in Mathematics". By Dan Freed is one of the founders of the IAS / Park City Mathematics Institute, at the summer courses ( run by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton ) are held.
Uhlenbeck dealt at Palais first with calculus of variations and later became best known for work on nonlinear partial differential equations in various geometric and physical problems, and they worked closely together at the University of Chicago with Shing -Tung Yau. They proved the existence of Coulombeichungen in Yang-Mills equations and led to the fact that they are elliptical in this calibration, analytical properties of their solutions from. Specifically, their estimates of ( self-dual ) instanton solutions of Yang-Mills equations were important analytical preparatory work for Simon Donaldson classification of differentiable structures on four-dimensional manifolds, for which he received the Fields Medal. They also dealt with nonlinear wave equations and integrable systems with infinitely many conserved quantities ( solitons ).
In 1983 she received the MacArthur Fellowship. In 1990 she held at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto, one of the plenary ( Applications of nonlinear analysis in topology ) and 1983 she was invited speaker on the ICM in Warsaw ( Variational problems for gauge fields ). In 1985, she was AMS Colloquium Lecturer and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1986 to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. In 2007 she received the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. In 2000 she received the National Medal of Science from the United States. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
She is married to the biophysicist Olke Cornelis Uhlenbeck, son of George Uhlenbeck.