UT-Austin professor wins top math prize
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’s Abel Prize — an award modeled on the Nobel Prizes — to Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The award cites “the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.”
One of Uhlenbeck’s 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.
In the process, she helped pioneer a field known as geometric analysis, and she developed techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians.
“She did things nobody thought about doing,” said SunYung Alice Chang, a mathematician at Princeton University who served on the five-member prize committee.
Uhlenbeck, who now lives in Princeton, N.J., learned that she won the prize Sunday morning.
“When I came out of church, I noticed that I had a text message from Alice Chang that said, Would I please accept a call from Norway?” Uhlenbeck said. “When I got home, I called Norway back and they told me.”
Uhlenbeck, 76, a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said she had not decided what to do with the $700,000 prize money.
There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and for decades, the most prestigious awards in math were the Fields Medals, awarded in small batches every four years to the most accomplished mathematicians who are 40 or younger. Maryam Mirzakhani, in 2014, is the only woman to receive a Fields Medal.
The Abel, named after Norwegian mathematician Niels Hendrik Abel, is set up more like the Nobels. Since 2003, it has been given out annually to highlight important advances in mathematics. The previous 19 laureates — in three years, the prize was split between two mathematicians — were men, including Andrew J. Wiles, who proved Fermat’s last theorem and is now at the University of Oxford; Peter D. Lax of New York University; and John F. Nash Jr., whose life was portrayed in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.”
In her early work, Uhlenbeck essentially figured out the shape of soap films in higher-dimensional curved spaces. This is an example of what mathematicians call optimization problems, which are often very difficult and can have zero solutions, one solution or many solutions.
In 1983, at 41, she received broader recognition with a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant, which comes with a bundle of money — $204,000 in Uhlenbeck’s case.
In 1990, she became the second woman to give one of the highlighted plenary talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians, a quadrennial meeting. At each congress, there are 10 to 20 plenary talks, but for decades, all of the speakers had been men.
“That was almost more unnerving” than being the first woman to receive an Abel, Uhlenbeck said.