Loading AI tools
British mathematician (born 1959) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, DBE FRS (born 21 August 1959)[2] is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry.[3][4]
Frances Kirwan | |
---|---|
Born | 21 August 1959[1] UK |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge University of Oxford |
Awards | Whitehead Prize (1989) Senior Whitehead Prize (2013) Suffrage Science award (2016) Sylvester Medal of The Royal Society(2021) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Oxford |
Thesis | The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry |
Doctoral advisor | Michael Atiyah |
Website | www |
Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College in the University of Cambridge.[5] She took a D.Phil at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.[6]
Kirwan's research interests include moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, geometric invariant theory (GIT), and in the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry.[7] Her work endeavours to understand the structure of geometric objects by investigation of their algebraic and topological properties.[8] She introduced the Kirwan map.
From 1983 to 1985 she held a junior fellowship at Harvard. From 1983 to 1986 she held a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.[9] She is an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge[10] and also at Magdalen College.[11]
In 1996, she was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of Mathematics. From 2004 to 2006 she was president of the London Mathematical Society, the second-youngest president in the society's history and only the second woman to be president.[12][13] In 2005, she received a five-year EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship, to support her research on the moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves.[14]
In 2017, she was elected Savilian Professor of Geometry, becoming the first woman to hold the post.[15] While this entailed a move to New College, Oxford she was elected an emeritus fellow at Balliol.[16] She was the convenor of the 2008–9 meeting of European Women in Mathematics and deputy convenor of the following meeting in 2010–11.[17]
Kirwan served on the medal-selection committee that awarded the Fields medal to Maryam Mirzakhani.[27]