Agnes Scott College

Karen Uhlenbeck

Karen Uhlenbeck

August 24, 1942 -

Karen Uhlenbeck graduated from the University of Michigan in 1964. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1968 with a thesis on "The Calculus of Variations and Global Analysis." Uhlenbeck has made "pioneering contributions to global analysis and gauge theory that resulted in advances in mathematical physics and the theory of partial differential equations." [MAA Focus]. She has taught at MIT, Berkeley, the University of Illinois in both Champaign-Urbana and Chicago, and since 1988 has held the Third Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents' Chair in Mathematics at the University of Texas. She was a MacArthur Fellow in 1983, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985) and the National Academy of Sciences (1986). On December 1, 2000, she received a National Medal of Science for "special recognition by reason of [her] outstanding contributions to knowledge" in the area of mathematics. She has also served as Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society. In 1990 she became only the second woman (after Emmy Noether in 1932) to give a Plenary Lecture at an International Congress of Mathematics.

Uhlenbeck is a co-founder of the IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute and the program for Women and Mathematics in Princeton. In 2007 she received the AMS Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Mathematical Research for her foundational contributions in analytic aspects of mathematical gauge theory that appeared in two papers in the Communications in Mathematical Physics in 1982. You can read her acceptance speech from her home page at the University of Texas.

Read a reprint of Karen Uhlenbeck's Personal Profile that appeared in the MAA Math Horizons.

In 2019 Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the prestigious Abel Prize in mathematics from the Norwegian Academy of Science.

References

  1. Profile from The Noether Lectures: Profiles of Women in Mathematics, AWM
  2. Karen Uhlenbeck's Home Page
  3. Klarreich, Erica. "Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize", Quanta Magazine, March 19, 2019.
  4. Taylor, Lyn. "Karen Uhlenbeck," in Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary, Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl, Editors, Greenwood Press (1998), 261-266.
  5. "Two Mathematicians Awarded National Medals of Science," FOCUS, The Newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America, January 2001, p3.
  6. "Uhlenbeck Receives National Medal of Science," AWM Newsletter, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2001), 9-10. [Reprinted in Complexities: Women in Mathematics, Bettye Anne Case and Anne Leggett, Editors, Princeton University Press (2005), 195-196.]
  7. Henrion, Claudia. Women in Mathematics: The Addition of Difference, Indiana University Press, 1997, 25-46.
  8. Ambrose, S. et al. Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering, No Universal Constants, Temple University Press. (Contains the personal profile of Karen Uhlenbeck referenced above.)
  9. Donaldson, Simon. "Karen Uhlenbeck and the Calculus of Variations," Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 66, No. 3 (March 2019), 303-313.
  10. MathSciNet [subscription required]
  11. Author Profile at zbMath
  12. Mathematics Genealogy Project
  13. Biography at the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive

Photo Credit: Photograph used with permission of the Association for Women in Mathematics and is taken from Profiles of Women in Mathematics-The Emmy Noether Lectures, published by the AWM.