June 4, 1972
In 2002 Susan Howson became the first woman in over 120 years to receive the Adams Prize in mathematics, one of England's more prestigious mathematical awards. The prize, given annually by the University of Cambridge to a British mathematician under the age of 40, commemorates the discovery by John Couch Adams of the planet Neptune through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus. Some previous winners have been James Clark Maxwell, Stephen Hawking, and Roger Penrose.
Howson received her B.A. degree in mathematics, first class, from the University of Cambridge in 1993. She had only male professors while a student at Cambridge. Howson remained at Cambridge for a year to do Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, then entered the graduate program to study number theory and the arithmetic of elliptic curves. She received her Ph.D. degree in 1998 with a thesis on "Iwasawa Theory of Elliptic Curves for p-adic Lie Extensions" [Abstract], written under the supervision of J.H. Coates. Howson taught for a year at MIT in the United States as a Moore Instructor of Mathematics, then returned to England where she held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship in conjunction with a lectureship at the University of Nottingham. She is currently a Fellow in Mathematics at New College of the University of Oxford and a C.U.F. Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford.
The announcement of the Adams Prize said that "Howson has done research of great promise on the study of the arithmetic of elliptic curves via the p-adic methods of Iwasawa theory. Her work involves novel techniques from non-commutative algebra, combined with number-theoretic arguments."
Listen to an interview with Susan Howson on the Woman's Hour BBC Radio show from March 8, 2002.