Dusa mcduff biography of abraham

By the time that Dusa completed her secondary schooling in Edinburgh she had a boyfriend. This led to her choosing the University of Edinburgh for her undergraduate studies, turning down a scholarship which she had won to go to Cambridge University. During her undergraduate years at Edinburgh Dusa married her boyfriend and took his name becoming Dusa McDuff.

Awarded a B. This time her husband followed her to Cambridge. Then McDuff followed her husband again, this time with a six month visit to Moscow. He was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky and Dusa had no specific plans, yet it would turn out a very profitable dusa mcduff biography of abraham for her mathematically.

She met Israil Gelfand in Moscow and he gave her a deeper appreciation of mathematics. McDuff wrote:- Gelfand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which he could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly.

I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gelfand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences! There she attended Frank Adams 's topology lectures and around this time her first child was born. However her research at this time was not well focused and she began to lose her way a little.

Appointed to a position as a lecturer at the University of York in she began to work with Graeme Segal on classifying spaces of categories. To a certain extent she considered this as a second doctorate to regain direction for her research. McDuff accepted a position as an assistant professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and between andshe worked her way from assistant to associate professor.

While finding herself as a mathematician and working as a professor, Dusa remarried and had another child. Somewhere in there, she managed to achieve an equilibrium of being a mother, a wife, a teacher, and a scholar. From untilDusa served as the chair in the math department of the University. WISE is funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and it is designed to provide support for female freshman who intend to follow a career path of science, mathematics, or engineering.

Of forty new fellows, Dr. McDuff was the only woman, and of the Royal Society's 1, members who are scientists including mathematicianstwo are female mathematicians. To an outsider it certainly appears that Dusa has found herself -- as a mathematician and as a person. She is also a member of the Association of Women Scientists, one of the many organizations that now help to provide the support for professional women who work in the fields of science and mathematics that Dusa and many others lacked when she started out.

When she accepted the first Ruth Lyttle Satter prize for mathematics achievement inDusa said: "One important way of combating such isolation is to make both the achievements of woman mathematicians and the different ways in which we live more visible. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. References "Dusa McDuff. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.

Margaret Dusa McDuff gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. More From encyclopedia. Margaret del Balzo. Margaret de Rohan fl. Margaret de Rohan — Margaret de Foix fl. Margaret de Foix d. Margaret de Burgh d. Margaret de Burgh c. Margaret Colonna, Bl. Turning down a scholarship to the University of Cambridge to stay with her boyfriend in Scotlandshe enrolled at the University of Edinburgh.

Here, under the guidance of mathematician George A. Reid, McDuff worked on problems in functional analysis. She solved a problem on Von Neumann algebrasconstructing infinitely many different factors of type II 1and published the work in the Annals of Mathematics. Following her husband, the literary translator David McDuffshe left for a six-month visit to Moscow.

Her husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky.

Dusa mcduff biography of abraham

Though McDuff had no specific plans [ 9 ] it turned out to be a profitable visit for her mathematically. There, she met Israel Gelfand in Moscow who gave her a deeper appreciation of mathematics. The first thing that Gel'fand told me was that he was much more interested in the fact that my husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky than that I had found infinitely many type II-sub-one factorsbut then he proceeded to open my eyes to the world of mathematics.

It was a wonderful education, in which reading PushkinMozart and Salieri played as important a role as learning about Lie groups or reading Cartan and Eilenberg. Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which he could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly.

I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences! On returning to Cambridge McDuff started attending Frank Adams 's topology lectures and was soon invited to teach at the University of York. In she separated from her husband, and was divorced in At this time a position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT opened up for her, reserved for visiting female mathematicians.

Her career as a mathematician developed further while at MITand soon she was accepted to the Institute for Advanced Study where she worked with Segal on the Atiyah—Segal completion theorem. She then returned to England, where she took up a lectureship at the University of Warwick. Around this time she met mathematician John Milnor who was then based in Princeton University.

To live closer to him she took up an untenured assistant professorship at the Stony Brook University. She has since worked on symplectic topology.