Dusa McDuff
Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE (born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry.[7] She writes: I always wanted to be a mathematician (apart from a time when I was eleven when I wanted to be a farmer's wife), and assumed that I would have a career, but I had no idea how to go about it: I didn't realize that the choices which one made about education were important and I had no idea that I might experience real difficulties and conflicts in reconciling the demands of a career with life as a woman.She solved a problem on Von Neumann algebras, constructing infinitely many different factors of type II1, and published the work in the Annals 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 factors, but then he proceeded to open my eyes to the world of mathematics.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.Her career as a mathematician developed further while at MIT, and soon she was accepted to the Institute for Advanced Study where she worked with Segal on the Atiyah–Segal completion theorem.In the spring of 1985, McDuff attended the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris to study Mikhael Gromov's work on elliptic methods.[13] More recently, partly in collaboration with Susan Tolman,[14] she has studied applications of methods of symplectic topology to the theory of Hamiltonian torus actions.