Cambridge Women in Mathematics - Past and Present

Philippa Fawcett

Philippa was born in 1868, daughter ofHenry Fawcett and Millicent GarrettFawcett. She won a scholarship toNewnham in 1887 to study mathematics.At that time, women were not eligible forCambridge degrees (this did not happentill 1948, the year of Philippa’s death) butthey had won permission to sit the sameexaminations as the men (in differentrooms, of course). Their results would be read out after the men’s, but inmathematics each candidate was assigned a place relative to theordered list of male candidates. In 1890, Philippa Fawcett scored thehighest mark of all candidates for Part 1 of the Mathematical Tripos. Shewas placed "above the Senior Wrangler". After a year doing research,she became a college lecturer at Newnham for the next 14 years. Afterthis she took up a post as a lecturer in a normal school in Johannesburgwhere she trained mathematics teachers. In 1905, after discreet enquiry,she applied for the post of principal director to the Director of Educationin the newly formed London County Council. She was, remarkably,offered the job without interview and at the same salary as a man. Shecontinued in this post till her retirement in 1934.

Dr Vicky Neale

Vicky Neale received her PhD inCambridge in 2011, under the supervisionof Professor Ben Green. Her researchinterests are in analytic number theory andadditive combinatorics, for example inpossible generalisations of Waring’sproblem.Vicky is now a Senior Teaching Associate in DPMMS and is Director ofthe Cambridge Mathematics Education Project. She is also Fellow andthe Director of Studies in Mathematics at Murray Edwards.

Dr Susan Howson

Susan Howson received her Ph.D. inmathematics from the University ofCambridge in 1998 with a thesis titled‘Iwasawa Theory of Elliptic Curves forp-Adic Lie Extensions’ under thesupervision of John H. Coates. In 2002she won the Adams Prize for work onnumber theory and elliptic curves. TheAdams Prize is awarded each year by theFaculty of Mathematics and St.John’s College to a young researcher based in the United Kingdom whois doing first-class international research in the mathematical sciences.Susan was the first woman to win this prize.

Susan has taught and worked at MIT, University of Cambridge, Universityof Oxford, University of Nottingham and the Université de Paris 13 andheld a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship.

Professor Anne Davis

The Professorship of MathematicalPhysics (1967) is one of DAMTP’slongest-established Professorships andhas previously been held by JohnPolkinghorne, John Taylor and Neil Turok.

Professor Davis, whose research is in thearea of theoretical cosmology, has beenone of the leading proponents of thechameleon particle theory that potentiallyaccounts for the observed acceleration of the universe which presents amajor cosmological puzzle.

She spent time at Durham, Imperial College, CERN and Princeton beforearriving at DAMTP, first as an SERC Advanced Fellow, in 1983. She waspromoted to a personal Professorship in Theoretical Physics in 2002 andelected a Member of the Academia Europeae in 2009.

Galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, better known as a bullet cluster ,using images from Magellan and Hubble SpaceTelescope, and from Chandra Telescope

Professor Natalia Berloff

Professor Berloff is an expert onmathematical modelling of quantum fluids,and her particular contribution was tomodel the behaviour of new particles called’polaritons’ that are formed when laserbeam shines on the chip.

Natalia graduated from the Department ofComputational Mathematics andCybernetics, Lomonosov Moscow State University with MS in 1992. Afterobtaining her PhD in mathematics at the Florida State University in 1997and working as a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently as an Assistantprofessor at UCLA, she has been a faculty member (Lecturer, Readerand then Full Professor) at DAMTP and a Fellow of Jesus College. Sheheads the Cambridge-Skoltech Center on Quantum Fluids. Natalia alsoholds a professorship at the Skolkovo Institute of Science andTechnology and serves there as an Associate Dean of Faculty.

A quantum fluid trapped on top of a semiconductor chip can be used to measure movements to astonishingprecision.

Professor Dame Frances Kirwan

Professor Kirwan studied maths as anundergraduate at the University of Cambridge.She undertook a D.Phil at Oxford in 1984(dissertation title ‘The Cohomology ofQuotients in Symplectic and AlgebraicGeometry‘), which was supervised by Prof SirMichael Atiyah.Her research interests include moduli spaces in algebraic geometry,geometric invariant theory, and symplectic geometry. Her workendeavours to understand the structure of geometric objects by subtleinvestigation of their algebraic and topological properties. She introducedthe Kirwan map.

Professor Dusa McDuff

For the last 25 years, Professor DusaMcDuff of Columbia University has been amajor contributor to the spectaculardevelopment of symplectic topology into acentral area of modern mathematics.Among her many breakthrough results arethe first example of symplectic forms on aclosed manifold that are cohomologousbut not diffeomorphic and the classificationof rational and ruled symplecticfour-manifolds, completed with Francois Lalonde - a work that laidfoundations for fourdimensional symplectic topology.

In recent years, McDuff, partly in collaboration with Sue Tolman, haspioneered applications of powerful methods of ‘hard’ symplectic topologyto the theory of Hamiltonian torus actions. For instance, she discoveredthe astonishing fact that every closed symplectic manifold admitting aneffective Hamiltonian circle action is necessarily uniruled. Her work haschanged the face of this field.

McDuff and Dietmar Salamon have written two highly influentialtextbooks, considered nowadays as classic references on symplectictopology. McDuff’s numerous honors include a plenary lecture at the ICM(Berlin) and the Satter Prize of the AMS. She is a Fellow of the RoyalSociety of London and a member of the US National Academy ofSciences.

Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Dr Carola Schönlieb studied for a Master’sdegree in Mathematics at the University ofSalzburg, before coming to Cambridge tocomplete her PhD. After completing her PhDshe worked as a research assistant in Austriaand Germany, before returning to Cambridgeas a Lecturer in Applied and ComputationalAnalysis.Her research interests include nonlinear PDEs and computationalanalysis, with applications in digital image medical imaging and signalprocessing.

Cambridge Women in Mathematics Mathematics Open Day 2014 http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk