Who is Karen Uhlenbeck?
Dr. Karen Uhlenbeck, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, won the Abel Prize, often called the Nobel Prize of Mathematics last year. She was the first woman to win the Abel Prize.
March 18, 2020, Hans Petter Graver, President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, will announce the winner of the 2020 Abel Prize. Hans Munthe-Kaas, chair of the Abel committee, will then give the reasons for the awarding of the prize. The announcement will be transmitted as a live webcast.
Last year’s winner, Dr.Karen Uhlenbeck, was the first woman to win the prestigious award, a real STEM heroine. Will another woman win again this year?
Professor Uhlenbeck admits that mathematics can be a difficult field for women to get their foot in the door. She also pointed out in the magazine Math Horizons that many STEM scholars in the USA come from overseas.
“I think what has changed today is that people are tremendously more subtle, so that you don’t know what it is you’re up against. This is true not only for women but for a lot of young people. Young people today are up against the fact that most of the young scientists are coming from abroad, and so most of the people coming into academia are being trained somewhere other than the United States. No one ever talks about this phenomenon of who is actually succeeding in the sciences and engineering — foreign-born men and women. I try to talk about this with my students. It’s difficult, however, because you’re not supposed to talk about it. In the large classes of engineering students I teach, I’m seeing a lot more diversity — women, Hispanics, African-Americans. It can be done, not just by white, Anglo men.”
In addition to the Abel Award in 2019, Dr. Uhlenbeck won the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 2007 and the MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. Her specialty is partial differential equations.
She works “on partial differential equations which were originally derived from the need to describe things like electromagnetism, but have undergone a century of change in which they are used in a much more technical fashion to look at the shapes of space. Mathematicians look at imaginary spaces constructed by scientists examining other problems. [She]started out [her] mathematics career by working on Palais’ modern formulation of a very useful classical theory, the calculus of variations. [She]decided Einstein’s general relativity was too hard, but managed to learn a lot about geometry of space time. [She] did some very technical work in partial differential equations, made an unsuccessful pass at shock waves, worked in scale invariant variational problems, made a poor stab at three manifold topology, learned gauge field theory and then some about applications to four manifolds, and have recently been working n equations with algebraic infinite symmetries. I find that I am bored with anything I understand. My excuse is that I am too poor an expositor to want to spend time on formal matters.”
After my stroke, my cognitive therapist worked with me up to fourth grade math, so there is no way I personally could comprehend her work. However, I think if I tried, I might be able to manage fifth grade arithmetic.
Since Dr. Uhlenbeck is seeing more diversity amongst her students, perhaps this year’s winner will be female again or POC. It’s a pity the Abel Prize was not established until 2002, and that Katherine Johnson is long retired. Otherwise the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019 might be able to add another feather to her cap.