Jessica Purcell

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Jessica A. Shepherd Purcell is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology whose research topics have included hyperbolic Dehn surgery and the Jones polynomial. She is a professor of mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. [1]

Contents

Education

Purcell credits a high school mathematics teacher, Mr. Pehrson, for her interest in mathematics. [2] She majored in mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Utah, with a minor in computer science. She was a co-winner of the 1998 Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman of the Association for Women in Mathematics, [3] [4] and graduated summa cum laude in 1998. [1]

After earning a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1999, [1] Purcell completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2004. Her dissertation, Cusp Shapes of Hyperbolic Link Complements and Dehn Filling, was supervised by Steven Kerckhoff. [1] [5]

Career

After postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin and University of Oxford, Purcell became an assistant professor at Brigham Young University in 2007. [1] She was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2011, [1] [6] and earned tenure at Brigham Young in 2013. After visits to Monash University and at the Institute for Advanced Study as a Von Neumann Fellow, she moved to Monash as an associate professor in 2015, became an ARC Future Fellow in 2017, and was named full professor in 2019. [1]

She chaired the Women in Mathematics Special Interest Group of the Australian Mathematical Society for 2018–2019 and 2019–2020. [7]

Recognition

Purcell was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in May 2025. [8] She was elected to the 2026 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. [9]

Books

Purcell is the author of the book Hyperbolic Knot Theory (Graduate Studies in Mathematics 209, American Mathematical Society, 2020). [10] With David Futer and Efstratia Kalfagianni she is a coauthor of Guts of Surfaces and the Colored Jones Polynomial (Lecture Notes in Mathematics 2069, Springer, 2012). [11]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Curriculum vitae (PDF), Monash University, retrieved 2021-03-14
  2. ↑ Purcell, Jessica, Biography: Some frequently asked questions, Brigham Young University, retrieved 2021-03-14
  3. ↑ Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman 1998, Association for Women in Mathematics, retrieved 2021-03-14
  4. ↑ Gallian, Joseph A. (June–July 2019), "The First Twenty-Five Winners of the AWM Alice T. Schafer Prize" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 66 (6): 870–874, doi: 10.1090/noti1892
  5. ↑ Jessica Purcell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. ↑ "Math Professor Jessica Purcell Wins Prestigious Fellowship", BYU News, Brigham Young University, 23 February 2011, archived from the original on 2016-07-09, retrieved 2021-03-14
  7. ↑ Past WIMSIG executive committees, Australian Mathematical Society, retrieved 2021-03-14
  8. ↑ "Jessica Purcell". Australian Academy of Science. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
  9. ↑ "2026 Class of Fellows of the AMS". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2025-11-08.
  10. ↑ Reviews of Hyperbolic Knot Theory: Henry Segerman, MAA Reviews; Luisa Paoluzzi, Zbl   1480.57002; Kazushi Ahara, MR   4249621
  11. ↑ Reviews of Guts of Surfaces and the Colored Jones Polynomial: Heather A. Dye, MR   3024600; Daniel Moskovich, Zbl   1270.57002
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