Karen Uhlenbeck Is First Woman to Win Abel Prize for Mathematics
(The New York Times, 3/19/2019) For the first time, one of the top prizes in mathematics has been given to a woman.On Tuesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced it has awarded this year鈥檚 Abel Prize 鈥� an award modeled on the Nobel Prizes 鈥� to Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The award cites 鈥渢he fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.鈥�
One of Dr. Uhlenbeck鈥檚 advances in essence described the complex shapes of soap films not in a bubble bath but in abstract, high-dimensional curved spaces. In later work, she helped put a rigorous mathematical underpinning to techniques widely used by physicists in quantum field theory to describe fundamental interactions between particles and forces. Click to learn more.