| 1 | Name: | Dr. Dusa McDuff | |
| Institution: | Barnard College | ||
| Year Elected: | 2013 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1945 | ||
Dusa McDuff launched her career while she was a graduate student at Cambridge University (where she earned her PhD in 1970 under George Reid) when she solved a well-known problem about von Neumann algebras, constructing infinitely many different factors of "type II-one." She traveled to Moscow in 1969-70 where she had the good fortune to study with Israel M. Gelfand. He shared her view of mathematics as a kind of poetry and was a great inspiration, encouraging her to study topology. McDuff returned to Cambridge for a two-year Science Research Council Fellowship, working with Frank Adams and later Graeme Segal. She was appointed Lecturer first at the University of York (1972-76) and then at the University of Warwick (1976-78), and spent 1974-75 at MIT. McDuff was on the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1978-2008, starting as an Assistant Professor and ending as a Distinguished Professor, along the way serving as Department Chair, 1991-93, and Undergraduate Director, 1998-2000. She moved to Barnard College in 2007 to take up the Kimmel Chair of Mathematics. Throughout her career she has been concerned with educational issues at both undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as being active in encouraging more women to study mathematics. McDuff has worked in symplectic topology since the early 1980s. She has written over 90 papers, as well as co-authoring three books with Dietmar Salamon, most recently J-holomorphic curves and Symplectic Topology (AMS Colloquium Publication 52, 2 edition (2012)). McDuff has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies, UC Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, and at MSRI, in addition to serving on MSRI’s Scientific Advisory Committee (1990-98, Chair 1993-96). She has served on the MSRI Board of Trustees, as Chair 1998-2001, and currently as an ordinary member (2006-2017). Dusa McDuff has been awarded numerous honors including the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1991 and honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh (where she was an undergraduate), the University of York and the University of Strasbourg. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1994 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995; she became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1999. She is an Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, an Honorary Member of the London Mathematical Society and a corresponding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. McDuff has lectured widely in the US and abroad: for example Plenary Lecture at ICM Berlin (1998), AWM Noether Lecturer (1998), London Mathematical Society Hardy Lecturer (1999), Rademacher Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania (2001) and Andrejewski Lecturer, University of Gottingen (2001). She was awarded the AMS Steele Prize for Exposition in 2017. | |||