Agnes Scott College

Linda Preiss Rothschild

Linda Rothschild

February 28, 1945 -


Linda Rothschild was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, PA. She received her undergraduate degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and her Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 (she had been rejected for graduate work at Princeton on the grounds that the university accepted only men). Her Ph.D. thesis was "On the Adjoint Action of a Real Semisimple Lie Group." She held positions at Tufts University, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Princeton University before being appointed an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. She was promoted to full professor in 1979. Rothschild moved to the University of California at San Diego in 1982 as professor of mathematics where she remained until her retirement in 2011. San Diego.

Rothschild has worked in the areas of Lie groups, partial differential equations and harmonic analysis, and the analytic and geometric aspects of several complex variables. She has published over 80 papers in these areas. In 2003 she won the Stefan Bergman Prize from the American Mathematical Society (the prize was awarded jointly with her husband, Salah Baouendi.) The citation read in part:

The Bergman Prize was awarded to Professors Salah Baouendi and Linda Rothschild for their joint and individual work in complex analysis. In addition to many important contributions to complex analysis they have also done first rate work in the theory of partial differential equations. Their recent work is centered on the study of CR manifolds to which they and their collaborators have made fundamental contributions....

Rothschild, in a joint paper with E. Stein, introduced Lie group methods to prove Lp and Hölder estimates for the sum of squares operators as well as the boundary Kohn Laplacian for real hypersurfaces. In later joint work with L. Corwin and B. Helfer, she proved analytic hypoellipticity for a class of first order systems. She also proved the existence of a family of weakly pseudoconvex hypersurfaces for which the boundary Kohn Laplacian is hypoelliptic but does not satisfy maximal L2 estimates.

The work of Baouendi and Rothschild has had and continues to have tremendous impact on the theory of several complex variables.

Rothschild served as President of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1983 to 1985 and as Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society from 1985 to 1987. She presented the 1997 Emmy Noether Lecture for the AWM. In 2005 Rothschild was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

The conference Complex Analysis 2008 was held July 7-11, 2008 at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, in honor of Linda Rothschild for her influential contributions to the subject of several complex variables and connections to partial differential equations and geometry. A particular aim of the conference was to encourage female students to pursue an academic career in mathematics, a goal Rothschild has helped to foster by establishing a scholarship for unusually talented junior high school girls to accelerate their mathematical training by participating in a summer program. For an extended curriculum vitae and complete list of Rothschild's publications, see the conference proceedings published by Birkhauser/Springer in 2010.

Read her profile from the Emmy Noether Lecture.

References

  1. "Baouendi and Rothschild Receive 2003 Bergman Prize," Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (April 2003), 480-481.
  2. Peter Ebenfelt, Norbert Hungerbühler, Joseph J. Kohn, Ngaiming Mok, and Emil J. Straube (Editors). Complex Analysis (Trends in Mathematics), Birkhäuser Basel, 1st Edition (July 16, 2010).
  3. MathSciNet [subscription required]
  4. Author Profile at zbMath
  5. Mathematics Genealogy Project

Photo Credit: Photo courtesy of Linda Rothschild