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Person: Mcduff, Margaret Dusa Waddington

Dusa McDuff is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• Dusa was educated at a girls school in Edinburgh and, although the standard was less good than at the boys school, nevertheless she had an exceptionally good mathematics teacher.
• By the time that Dusa completed her secondary schooling in Edinburgh she had a boyfriend.
• Awarded a B.Sc. from Edinburgh in 1967, Dusa went to Girton College, Cambridge for her doctoral studies.
• At Cambridge McDuff was supervised by G A Reid and she worked on problems in functional analysis.
• After completing her doctorate in 1971 McDuff was appointed to a two-year Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cambridge.
• He was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky and Dusa had no specific plans, yet it would turn out a very profitable visit for her mathematically.
• Perhaps 1974 was a turning point for McDuff.
• McDuff had a friend, the mathematician Jack Milnor who worked in Princeton.
• After two years at Warwick, McDuff resigned her tenured post there and accepted an untenured post at the State University of New York at Stony Brook so that she could be close to Milnor.
• From the early 1980s McDuff worked on symplectic topology.
• McDuff has received many honours for her remarkable mathematical achievements.
• In addition to these honours McDuff has been invited to give many prestigious lectures.
• Although her research contributions to mathematics have been truly outstanding, McDuff has given service to mathematics in many other ways.
• In 1998 McDuff was named Distinguished Professor at SUNY at Stony Brook.
• This work also introduced a technique called symplectic inflation, an application of which is a theorem of McDuff on the existence of two symplectic structures in the same cohomology class that can be connected by a path of symplectic forms, but not by a path representing the same cohomology class.
• Throughout her distinguished career Dusa McDuff has received various awards, including invitations to address the International and European Congresses of Mathematics, several honorary degrees, a Fellowship of the Royal Society, and a Membership of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Outside mathematics McDuff says that her interests are reading, chamber music, playing the cello, gardening, walking, and talking to friends.

Born 18 October 1945, London, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Tags relevant for this person:

Origin England, Topology, Women

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

Github:

non-Github:

@J-J-O'Connor

@E-F-Robertson

References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive