Lillian Pierce

Lillian Beatrix Pierce is a mathematician whose research connects number theory with harmonic analysis.^[1] She is a professor of mathematics at Duke University.^[2]

Pierce at Oberwolfach

Early life and education

Pierce was home-schooled in Fallbrook, California^[1][3][4] and began playing the violin at age four.^[5] By age 11 she began performing professionally as a violinist.^[1] As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission.^[5] She entered Princeton University majoring in mathematics but intending to pursue an MD–PhD program;^[6] under the influence of faculty mentor and undergraduate thesis supervisor Elias M. Stein, her interests shifted towards pure mathematics.^[1][6][3] As an undergraduate, she also became an intern at the National Security Agency.^[1] She was Princeton's 2002 valedictorian and became a Rhodes Scholar, repeating two accomplishments of her brother Niles Pierce from nine years earlier.^[3]

She earned a master's degree at the University of Oxford in 2004.^[2][1] Returning to Princeton for doctoral study in mathematics, she completed her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation, Discrete Analogues in Harmonic Analysis, was supervised by Stein.^[2][7]

Career

After postdoctoral studies with Roger Heath-Brown at Oxford and at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, she became an assistant professor at Duke in 2014 and is now a full professor.^[2][1]

Research

Pierce was one of the first mathematicians to prove nontrivial upper bounds on the number of elements of finite order in an ideal class group.^[8]

Awards and honors

Pierce won the 2018 Sadosky Prize for research that "spans and connects a broad spectrum of problems ranging from character sums in number theory to singular integral operators in Euclidean spaces" including in particular "a polynomial Carleson theorem for manifolds".^[9] She received the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.^[10] She was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the class of 2021 "for contributions to number theory and harmonic analysis".^[11] The Association for Women in Mathematics named her to their 2025 Class of AWM Fellows.^[12]

Personal life

Her husband, Tobias Overath, also works at Duke as a neuroscientist.^[1]