Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 361 | 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. | |
| 362 | Name: | Dr. Kathleen McKeown | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 107 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Kathleen McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She was also the Founding Director of Columbia's Data Science Institute, a position she held from July 2012 to June 2017. She served as Department Chair from 1998-2003 and was Vice Dean for Research for the School of Engineering and Applied Science for two years. Before arriving at Columbia, she received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982.
McKeown has transformed the Natural Language Processing field, pioneering automatic text generation, which she introduced in her Ph.D. thesis. She created the field of automatic text summarization, introducing multi-document summarization to combine information about a single topic from diverse sources, developing NewsBlaster to summarize news for the government after 9/11. She also developed methods for generating medical explanations and identifying social posts in South Chicago likely to lead to violence for social workers' use. At Columbia she was the first female tenured in the Engineering School, started the Women in Computer Sciences Student Group, and was the first female Computer Sciences Chair
McKeown received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women in 1991, and the Anita Borg Woman of Vision Award for Innovation in 2010. She was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics from 1992 to 1993, has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery since 2003, a member of the United States National Academies of Science, since 2018, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2019. McKeown was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |
| 363 | Name: | Dr. Digby J. McLaren | | | Institution: | Royal Society of Canada | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1919 | | | Death Date: | December 8, 2004 | | | | |
| 364 | Name: | Robert R. McMath | | | Year Elected: | 1942 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1892 | | | Death Date: | 1/2/62 | | | | |
| 365 | Name: | Dr. Edwin M. McMillan | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1952 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 9/7/91 | | | | |
| 366 | Name: | Dr. Curtis T. McMullen | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | |
| 367 | Name: | Dr. Marcia K. McNutt | | | Institution: | National Academy of Sciences | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Marcia K. McNutt received a B.A. in physics at Colorado College and a Ph.D. in Earth sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1978. She was a geophysicist for the Branch of Tectonophysics of the U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park from 1979-82. In 1982 she joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, serving as the associate director of the SeaGrant College Program from 1993-95. For the next two years she directed the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Joint Program in Oceanography. From 1997 to 2009 she directed the privately funded Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, serving as its president and chief executive officer. In 2009 President Obama nominated her to be the Director of the United States Geological Survey and her nomination was approved. She stepped down as Director of the USGS in February 2013 and returned to the west coast. In June 2013 she became Editor-in-Chief of "Science," the journals from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was elected President of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. In 2017 she was named the Desert Research Institute's Nevada Medalist.
Marcia McNutt is an active student of the Earth's physical properties. She relies for her field and modelling work principally on geophysical data, some of which she has collected herself in the course of more than 20 oceanographic cruises using equipment she helped to design. Her studies have led to more than 90 papers in international refereed journals on such topics as convection in Earth's mantle, continental break-up, and the uplift of the Tibetan plateau. Dr. McNutt is the recipient of the Macelwane Medal and the Maurice Ewing Medal of the American Geophysical Union, the MIT School of Science Graduate Teaching Prize, and the Sanctuary Reflections Award of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. She was elected president of the American Geophysical Union in 2000-2002. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. | |
| 368 | Name: | Dr. Edward J. McShane | | | Institution: | University of Virginia | | | Year Elected: | 1959 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 6/1/89 | | | | |
| 369 | Name: | Charles E.K. Mees | | | Year Elected: | 1937 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1882 | | | Death Date: | 8/15/60 | | | | |
| 370 | Name: | Dr. Jerrold Meinwald | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 1987 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1927 | | | Death Date: | April 24, 2018 | | | | | | |
Jerrold Meinwald, Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Cornell University, died April 24, 2018, at the age of 91. He was educated at the University of Chicago (Ph.B. 1947, B.S. 1948) and at Harvard (M.A. 1950, Ph.D. 1952), where he worked with R.B. Woodward. He was a member of the group of scientists who founded the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, and served as an ICIPE Research Director from 1970-77. He is a founding member of CIRCE (the Cornell Institute for Research in Chemical Ecology).
Dr. Meinwald's research covered a very broad range of topics, including molecular rearrangement mechanisms, the synthesis and reactions of highly strained ring systems, organic photochemistry, natural product structure and synthesis, anesthetic stereochemistry, and insect chemical ecology. We typically think of communication as a fairly straightforward phenomenon involving speech, gestures, and more recently, electronic devices. But the majority of creatures interact through different means: a dazzling array of chemical signals. This is how insects talk to each other, find food, mate, bind together in communities, even make war. But it's not only bugs that communicate through chemicals—all living organisms, from microorganisms to human beings, do the same. The study of how organisms communicate and interact with their environment is a specialized field called chemical ecology, bridging organic chemistry and biology. Jerrold Meinwald is universally recognized as its founding father, along with Tom Eisner (1929-2011), his longtime biological collaborator. In a career spanning more than half a century, Meinwald defined chemical ecology as a new science, showing how it can help us better understand the behavior of living creatures and leading to important advances in medicine, pharmacology, and agriculture.
Born in New York, Meinwald attended the University of Chicago and obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard, then settled in for a fellowship at Cornell University, where he has spent his entire career. At first, he was known as a creative organic chemist, studying highly strained small molecules, photochemistry, and analytic spectroscopic techniques. He then became intrigued by the chemical defenses of arthropods. Among his early discoveries were lipophilic compounds secreted by some insects that help toxins permeate an attacker's protective cuticle, and the fact that fireflies and some other insects secrete steroids that make them unattractive meals for predators. He investigated the underlying chemical mechanisms that enabled organisms to synthesize these defensive agents, leading to the realization that one species, perhaps a plant, can make a precursor substance later used by another organism, such as an insect—a relationship between two species manifested at a chemical level.
This work led to the forging of a unique collaboration with Eisner, who had been studying many of the same questions from a biological perspective and arrived at Cornell shortly after Meinwald had joined the faculty. They combined forces to elevate the study of chemical signaling into the new discipline of chemical ecology, with Meinwald probing the chemistry and Eisner investigating the biology. They studied and characterized an extensive variety of chemical signaling and defense mechanisms in insects, plants, birds, fish, and mammals. The interactions they explained, from snakes that derive protective steroids for their eggs and hatchlings from toads they consume, to moths that convert a certain alkaloid to attract females which is later passed on as a defensive chemical to their eggs, to fish that secrete substances literally giving them a bad taste to predators, demonstrate the amazing range of remarkable evolutionary adaptations on Earth. The Meinwald/Eisner partnership opened up brand new vistas in chemistry and biology that are only beginning to be fully explored.
But the work has done even more than give science a deeper insight into the beautiful interconnected web of life on our planet. Meinwald's work in isolating, characterizing, and synthesizing the structure of various compounds used in nature points the way for the development of substances for practical applications: drugs, agricultural chemicals, and other yet unimagined uses. He continues to demonstrate that the natural chemicals that living creatures use to communicate, survive, and thrive have potential and promise waiting to be tapped.
He had been a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Medical School, the Rockefeller University, and the University of California, San Diego. He was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (1969), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1970) and the American Philosophical Society (1987), and held two J.S. Guggenheim Fellowships (1960-61, 1976-77). He served as a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (1983) and as a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH (1983-85). He was elected President of the International Society of Chemical Ecology in 1988. In 1989, he was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the University of Göteborg. Dr. Meinwald served as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1990-91). He was awarded the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1990 and the Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest in 1991. He served three terms as a National Sigma Xi Lecturer (1965, 1975, 1992-94). The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic awarded him the Heyrovsky Medal in 1996. He was a Senior Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2004) and was selected for the 2005 Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry by the American Chemical Society. He was awarded the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry by the Franklin Institute and won the 2014 National Medal of Science.
Music was Dr. Meinwald's chief recreational activity. He studied flute with Arthur Lora, James Pappoutsakis and Marcel Moyse and frequently combines chamber music performances on flute, recorder, or flauto traverso with visiting lectureships. | |
| 371 | Name: | Dr. Jerry M. Melillo | | | Institution: | The Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Jerry Melillo is an ecologist/biogeochemist and was the Co-Director of The Ecosystem Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He is an alumnus of Wesleyan (BA, MAT) and Yale (MFS, Ph.D.). Dr. Melillo has been at the MBL for 30 years and has become a prominent figure in science policy, recognized internationally for his research on global warming and climate change. He is interested in how human activities are altering the biology and chemistry of terrestrial ecosystems. His studies take him around the world, from the tropics of Brazil to the Swedish sub-Arctic. Melillo studies carbon and nitrogen cycling in terrestrial ecosystems by using a combination of large field experiments and computer simulation models. Both are critical to understanding how climate change might affect our world in the future. Together with his colleagues, Melillo is presently conducting a soil-warming experiment at the Harvard Forest in western Massachusetts and a carbon dioxide enrichment and plant and soil warming experiment at the Abisko Research Station in northern Sweden to study the effects of global warming on soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics, plant growth, and potential feedbacks to the climate system. In addition to field research, Melillo uses computer simulation models to help answer the many "what if" questions related to the effects of future climate change. The models not only synthesize and integrate a lot of information, but they help give rise to new field experiments. Melillo and his colleagues are using the results of their field experiments and their computer simulation models to explore the consequences of a range of stresses, such as climate change, ozone pollution and acid rain, on the forests of New England. How will forest growth be affected? Might some tree species do better than others, such that the composition of our forests will change? Will the quality of water draining from the affected forests be diminished? Melillo and other Ecosystem Center scientists are collaborating with Chinese researchers to explore similar questions about the forests of China. Working with Brazilian scientists, Melillo and other Center scientists are studying how the clearing of rainforests of the Amazon Basin for pastures and soybean fields affects the rate at which climate-changing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are emitted to the atmosphere. They are also studying the links between land-cover and land-use changes, stream water quality, and biodiversity in the streams. For the last 10 years, Melillo and Ecosystems Center staff have collaborated with economists, atmospheric chemists and physicists, and ocean scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to build a large model that couples the land, oceans, and atmosphere with a projected set of economic futures. Melillo's group focuses on the terrestrial portion of the model. In the late 1990s, he temporarily left the MBL to serve in Washington as the Associate Director for Environment in President Clinton's Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he directed programs on environmental monitoring of ecosystem health and advised the administration on natural resource and pollution issues. Science education has long been of interest to Melillo. In 1997, he founded the Semester in Environmental Science (SES) at the Marine Biological Laboratory. SES is a 15-week program in environmental science offered each fall to students enrolled in colleges participating in the MBL Consortium in Environmental Science. Recently, Melillo headed an MBL team to develop a new Brown University-MBL Graduate Program in Biological and Environmental Studies. The first group of graduate students entered the program in the fall of 2004. As part of this Brown/MBL partnership, Melillo was appointed to the Brown faculty as a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Melillo is currently President of the Ecological Society of America, and Past-President of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, an international organization that conducts assessments of emerging environmental issues. He lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts with his wife, Lalise, who teaches history and rhetoric at Falmouth Academy, a local private school. They have one son, Ted Melillo, who is a graduate of Swarthmore College and is now finishing his Ph.D. in environmental history at Yale. | |
| 372 | Name: | Donald H. Menzel | | | Year Elected: | 1943 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1901 | | | Death Date: | 12/14/76 | | | | |
| 373 | Name: | Dr. N. David Mermin | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | | | | |
N. David Mermin received an A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1956. He stayed at Harvard, changing to physics, where he received a Ph.D. in 1961. He spent two postdoctoral years in Rudolf Peierls’ Department of Mathematical Physics in Birmingham England, followed by a year with Walter Kohn at the University of California, San Diego, before he joined Physics Department at Cornell University in 1964. Mermin was Director of Cornell’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics from 1984 to 1990, and retired from Cornell as the Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus, in 2006.
He is known for the Mermin-Wagner theorem in statistical mechanics, the Mermin-Ho relation in low-temperature physics, and the Lindhard-Mermin dielectric function in metals physics. He extended the fundamental theorem of density-functional theory to thermal equilibrium (chemistry), reformulated space-groups to include aperiodic crystals (crystallography), and applied topology to the theory of defects (condensed matter physics). He has written extensively about foundational issues in quantum mechanics.
His 1976 book Solid State Physics (with Neil W. Ashcroft) has been translated into six languages and remains the major text in the field, though still in its original edition. His Quantum Computer Science (2007) offers a unique perspective on this new, growing field. In addition to these two technical books he has written four books for a general audience. Space and Time in Special Relativity (1968) and It’s About Time (2005) give unusual and quite different expositions of special relativity, using no mathematical tools beyond plane geometry and some very elementary algebra. Boojums All the Way Through (1990) and Why Quark Rhymes with Pork (2016) are collections of his popular essays and lectures.
Mermin is well-known for his thirty "Reference Frame" columns commenting on physics and the practice of physics, that appeared in Physics Today between 1988 and 2009. All can be found in his quark-pork volume. His efforts to reconcile the two sides in the "science wars" of the 1990s met with more indignation than approval, from both factions. He has held dozens of named visiting lectureships throughout the United States and Europe.
He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1985 to 1989; a member of the Executive Committee of the Cornell Materials Science Center, in the 1980s; a member of the advisory board of arXiv.org in the late 90s and early 00s, and at various times a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Physics, Physics in Perspective, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
Mermin was a 1970 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a 1988 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a 1991 member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1989 he received the first Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, in 1994, the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, in 1997 Cornell’s Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2010 the Majorana "Best Person in Physics" Prize.
In retirement he continues to write and lecture on quantum foundations, works very hard at the piano (struggling to master, for example, the Chopin G Minor Ballade),
and collaborates with his wife Dorothy, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Emerita, on maintaining their house and the surrounding eight acres of gardens, meadows, and woodlands in the town of Dryden, New York, just outside of Ithaca.
"N." stands for "Nathaniel", which the USA Patriot Act is slowly requiring the world to call him. | |
| 374 | Name: | Paul W. Merrill | | | Year Elected: | 1939 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1887 | | | Death Date: | 7/19/61 | | | | |
| 375 | Name: | Albert A. Michelson | | | Year Elected: | 1902 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1852 | | | Death Date: | 5/9/31 | | | | |
| 376 | Name: | John A. Miller | | | Year Elected: | 1915 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1860 | | | Death Date: | 6/15/46 | | | | |
| 377 | Name: | Dayton C. Miller | | | Year Elected: | 1919 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1867 | | | Death Date: | 2/22/41 | | | | |
| 378 | Name: | Robert A. Millikan | | | Year Elected: | 1914 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1868 | | | Death Date: | 12/19/53 | | | | |
| 379 | Name: | Dr. John W. Milnor | | | Institution: | State University of New York, Stony Brook | | | Year Elected: | 1965 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | | | | |
John W. Milnor is a professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he also co-directs the Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Known for his work in differential topology, K-theory and dynamical systems, Dr. Milnor was for many years associated with Princeton University, earning his Ph.D. there in 1954 and becoming Henry Putnam University Professor of Mathematics in 1962. His most celebrated single result is his proof of the existence of 7-dimensional spheres with nonstandard differential structure. Later, he showed that the 7-sphere has 15 differentiable structures (28 if you consider orientation). An n-sphere with nonstandard differential structure is called an exotic sphere, a term coined by Dr. Milnor. An accomplished mathematical writer with numerous books and papers, including many on topology and game theory, to his credit, he has also served as editor of the Annals of Mathematics since 1962. That same year, Dr. Milnor was awarded the Fields Medal for his work in differential topology, and since that time he has received many other awards, including the National Medal of Science (1967), the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research (1982), the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1989), the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2004), and both the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Acheivement and the Abel Prize in 2011. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. | |
| 380 | Name: | Dr. Maryam Mirzakhani | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1977 | | | Death Date: | July 15, 2017 | | | | | | |
Maryam Mirzakhani was the first female recipient of the Fields Medal, the leading international prize for mathematical research that must be awarded by the age of 40. To earn this distinction she had made outstanding contributions to understanding the dynamics and geometry of two-dimensional surfaces (known as Riemann surfaces) and their deformation (or moduli) spaces. She extended and integrated insights developed by other mathematical pioneers such as Thurston, Ratner, Margulis, and Bers in a wide variety of fields including algebraic geometry, topology and probability theory. Her work probed the structure of these moduli spaces by studying the behavior of simple geodesics, which are curves on the surface with no self-intersections that minimize the distance between any two points lying sufficiently close to each other on the curve. Mirzakhani and her coworkers produced the long sought-after proof of the conjecture that while the closure of a real geodesic in moduli space can be fractal the closure of a complex geodesic is always well-behaved, indeed an algebraic subvariety.
Born in Iran, Mirzakhani completed a bachelor's degree at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and completed her doctorate at Harvard University. She was a professor at Princeton University before moving to Stanford University in 2008. Dr. Mirzakhani died July 15, 2017, at the age of 40. | |
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