Lauren K. Williams | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1978 (age 45–46) |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Harvard University |
Thesis | Combinatorial aspects of total positivity (2005) |
Doctoral advisor | Richard P. Stanley |
Lauren Kiyomi Williams (born c. 1978) is an American mathematician known for her work on cluster algebras, tropical geometry, algebraic combinatorics, amplituhedra, and the positive Grassmannian. [1] She is Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. [2]
Williams's father is an engineer; her mother is third-generation Japanese American. She grew up in Los Angeles, where her interest in mathematics was sparked by winning a fourth-grade mathematics contest. [1] She was the valedictorian of Palos Verdes Peninsula High School in 1996, [2] and while there participated in summer research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Satomi Okazaki, a student of her eventual advisor, Richard P. Stanley. [1] She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2000 with a A.B. in mathematics, [2] and received her PhD in 2005 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Stanley. [3] Her dissertation was titled Combinatorial Aspects of Total Positivity.
After postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard, Williams rejoined the Berkeley mathematics department as an assistant professor in 2009, and was promoted to associate professor in 2013 and then full professor in 2016. [2]
Starting in the fall of 2018, she rejoined the Harvard mathematics department as a full professor, making her the second ever tenured female math professor at Harvard. The first, Sophie Morel, left Harvard in 2012. [4]
Along with colleagues O. Mandelshtam (her former student, now an assistant professor at University of Waterloo) and S. Corteel, in 2018 Williams developed a new characterization of both symmetric and nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials using the combinatorial exclusion process. [5]
In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. [6] She is the 2016 winner of the Association for Women in Mathematics and Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. [7] In 2022 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. [8]
Huai-Dong Cao is a Chinese–American mathematician. He is the A. Everett Pitcher Professor of Mathematics at Lehigh University. He is known for his research contributions to the Ricci flow, a topic in the field of geometric analysis.
Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.
In mathematics, Macdonald polynomialsPλ(x; t,q) are a family of orthogonal symmetric polynomials in several variables, introduced by Macdonald in 1987. He later introduced a non-symmetric generalization in 1995. Macdonald originally associated his polynomials with weights λ of finite root systems and used just one variable t, but later realized that it is more natural to associate them with affine root systems rather than finite root systems, in which case the variable t can be replaced by several different variables t=(t1,...,tk), one for each of the k orbits of roots in the affine root system. The Macdonald polynomials are polynomials in n variables x=(x1,...,xn), where n is the rank of the affine root system. They generalize many other families of orthogonal polynomials, such as Jack polynomials and Hall–Littlewood polynomials and Askey–Wilson polynomials, which in turn include most of the named 1-variable orthogonal polynomials as special cases. Koornwinder polynomials are Macdonald polynomials of certain non-reduced root systems. They have deep relationships with affine Hecke algebras and Hilbert schemes, which were used to prove several conjectures made by Macdonald about them.
In mathematics, an affine Hecke algebra is the algebra associated to an affine Weyl group, and can be used to prove Macdonald's constant term conjecture for Macdonald polynomials.
In mathematics, Macdonald-Koornwinder polynomials (also called Koornwinder polynomials) are a family of orthogonal polynomials in several variables, introduced by Koornwinder and I. G. Macdonald, that generalize the Askey–Wilson polynomials. They are the Macdonald polynomials attached to the non-reduced affine root system of type (C∨
n, Cn), and in particular satisfy analogues of Macdonald's conjectures. In addition Jan Felipe van Diejen showed that the Macdonald polynomials associated to any classical root system can be expressed as limits or special cases of Macdonald-Koornwinder polynomials and found complete sets of concrete commuting difference operators diagonalized by them. Furthermore, there is a large class of interesting families of multivariable orthogonal polynomials associated with classical root systems which are degenerate cases of the Macdonald-Koornwinder polynomials. The Macdonald-Koornwinder polynomials have also been studied with the aid of affine Hecke algebras.
In algebra and in particular in algebraic combinatorics, a quasisymmetric function is any element in the ring of quasisymmetric functions which is in turn a subring of the formal power series ring with a countable number of variables. This ring generalizes the ring of symmetric functions. This ring can be realized as a specific limit of the rings of quasisymmetric polynomials in n variables, as n goes to infinity. This ring serves as universal structure in which relations between quasisymmetric polynomials can be expressed in a way independent of the number n of variables.
Ivan Cherednik is a Russian-American mathematician. He introduced double affine Hecke algebras, and used them to prove Macdonald's constant term conjecture in. He has also dealt with algebraic geometry, number theory and Soliton equations. His research interests include representation theory, mathematical physics, and algebraic combinatorics. He is currently the Austin M. Carr Distinguished Professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Sylvie Corteel is a French mathematician at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Paris Diderot University and the University of California, Berkeley, who was an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. Her research concerns the enumerative combinatorics and algebraic combinatorics of permutations, Young tableaux, and integer partitions.
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