Marie-Louise Michelsohn (born October 8, 1941) is a professor of mathematics at State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Marie-Louise Michelsohn (born October 8, 1941) is a professor of mathematics at State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Michelsohn attended the Bronx High School of Science. She attended the University of Chicago for her undergraduate and graduate studies, including her PhD.
She spent a year as a visiting professor at University of California at San Diego. She spent a year l'Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques outside of Paris, France. She then joined the faculty of State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Michelsohn's PhD was in the field of topology. As of 2020, she has published twenty articles, on topics including complex geometry, spin manifolds and the Dirac operator, and the theory of algebraic cycles. Half of her work has been in collaboration with Blaine Lawson. With Lawson, she wrote a textbook on spin geometry which has become the standard reference for the field.
In her most widely-known work, published in 1982, Michelsohn introduced the notion of a balanced metric on a complex manifold. These are hermitian metrics for which the penultimate power of the associated Kähler form is closed, i.e.
in which ω is the Kähler form and n is the complex dimension. It is trivial to see that every Kähler metric is a balanced metric. As for Kähler metrics, the above definition of a balanced metric automatically places cohomological restrictions on the underlying manifold; by Stokes' theorem, every codimension-one complex subvariety is homologically nontrivial. For instance, the Calabi-Eckmann complex manifolds do not support any balanced metrics. Michelsohn also recast the definition of a balanced metric in terms of the torsion tensor and in terms of the Dirac operator. In parallel to a work of Reese Harvey and Blaine Lawson's on Kähler metrics, Michelsohn obtained a full characterization, in terms of the cohomological theory of currents, of which complex manifolds admit balanced metrics.
Balanced metrics are, in part, of interest due to their role in the Strominger system arising from string theory.
Michelsohn is also an accomplished middle and long-distance runner. She holds five masters athletics world records including through three age divisions of the 2000 metres steeplechase which she has held since 2002. [1] In addition to the world records, she holds 6 more outdoor American records and 10 indoor American records, running the table of all official indoor distances 800 metres and above in both the W65 and W70 divisions. [2]
In algebraic and differential geometry, a Calabi–Yau manifold, also known as a Calabi–Yau space, is a particular type of manifold which has properties, such as Ricci flatness, yielding applications in theoretical physics. Particularly in superstring theory, the extra dimensions of spacetime are sometimes conjectured to take the form of a 6-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold, which led to the idea of mirror symmetry. Their name was coined by Candelas et al. (1985), after Eugenio Calabi who first conjectured that such surfaces might exist, and Shing-Tung Yau who proved the Calabi conjecture.
In the mathematical field of Riemannian geometry, the scalar curvature is a measure of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. To each point on a Riemannian manifold, it assigns a single real number determined by the geometry of the metric near that point. It is defined by a complicated explicit formula in terms of partial derivatives of the metric components, although it is also characterized by the volume of infinitesimally small geodesic balls. In the context of the differential geometry of surfaces, the scalar curvature is twice the Gaussian curvature, and completely characterizes the curvature of a surface. In higher dimensions, however, the scalar curvature only represents one particular part of the Riemann curvature tensor.
Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. Symplectic geometry has its origins in the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics where the phase space of certain classical systems takes on the structure of a symplectic manifold.
In mathematics and especially differential geometry, a Kähler manifold is a manifold with three mutually compatible structures: a complex structure, a Riemannian structure, and a symplectic structure. The concept was first studied by Jan Arnoldus Schouten and David van Dantzig in 1930, and then introduced by Erich Kähler in 1933. The terminology has been fixed by André Weil. Kähler geometry refers to the study of Kähler manifolds, their geometry and topology, as well as the study of structures and constructions that can be performed on Kähler manifolds, such as the existence of special connections like Hermitian Yang–Mills connections, or special metrics such as Kähler–Einstein metrics.
In mathematics, Hodge theory, named after W. V. D. Hodge, is a method for studying the cohomology groups of a smooth manifold M using partial differential equations. The key observation is that, given a Riemannian metric on M, every cohomology class has a canonical representative, a differential form that vanishes under the Laplacian operator of the metric. Such forms are called harmonic.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, Ricci-flatness is a condition on the curvature of a (pseudo-)Riemannian manifold. Ricci-flat manifolds are a special kind of Einstein manifold. In theoretical physics, Ricci-flat Lorentzian manifolds are of fundamental interest, as they are the solutions of Einstein's field equations in a vacuum with vanishing cosmological constant.
In differential geometry, a hyperkähler manifold is a Riemannian manifold endowed with three integrable almost complex structures that are Kähler with respect to the Riemannian metric and satisfy the quaternionic relations . In particular, it is a hypercomplex manifold. All hyperkähler manifolds are Ricci-flat and are thus Calabi–Yau manifolds.
In mathematics, and more specifically in differential geometry, a Hermitian manifold is the complex analogue of a Riemannian manifold. More precisely, a Hermitian manifold is a complex manifold with a smoothly varying Hermitian inner product on each (holomorphic) tangent space. One can also define a Hermitian manifold as a real manifold with a Riemannian metric that preserves a complex structure.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, the Calabi conjecture was a conjecture about the existence of certain kinds of Riemannian metrics on certain complex manifolds, made by Eugenio Calabi. It was proved by Shing-Tung Yau, who received the Fields Medal and Oswald Veblen Prize in part for his proof. His work, principally an analysis of an elliptic partial differential equation known as the complex Monge–Ampère equation, was an influential early result in the field of geometric analysis.
In mathematics, in particular in differential geometry, mathematical physics, and representation theory a Weitzenböck identity, named after Roland Weitzenböck, expresses a relationship between two second-order elliptic operators on a manifold with the same principal symbol. Usually Weitzenböck formulae are implemented for G-invariant self-adjoint operators between vector bundles associated to some principal G-bundle, although the precise conditions under which such a formula exists are difficult to formulate. This article focuses on three examples of Weitzenböck identities: from Riemannian geometry, spin geometry, and complex analysis.
In mathematics, a Clifford bundle is an algebra bundle whose fibers have the structure of a Clifford algebra and whose local trivializations respect the algebra structure. There is a natural Clifford bundle associated to any (pseudo) Riemannian manifold M which is called the Clifford bundle of M.
In mathematics, the Wirtinger inequality, named after Wilhelm Wirtinger, is a fundamental result in complex linear algebra which relates the symplectic and volume forms of a hermitian inner product. It has important consequences in complex geometry, such as showing that the normalized exterior powers of the Kähler form of a Kähler manifold are calibrations.
The Geometry Festival is an annual mathematics conference held in the United States.
The Lichnerowicz formula is a fundamental equation in the analysis of spinors on pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. In dimension 4, it forms a piece of Seiberg–Witten theory and other aspects of gauge theory. It is named after noted mathematicians André Lichnerowicz who proved it in 1963, and Roland Weitzenböck. The formula gives a relationship between the Dirac operator and the Laplace–Beltrami operator acting on spinors, in which the scalar curvature appears in a natural way. The result is significant because it provides an interface between results from the study of elliptic partial differential equations, results concerning the scalar curvature, and results on spinors and spin structures.
Herbert Blaine Lawson, Jr. is a mathematician best known for his work in minimal surfaces, calibrated geometry, and algebraic cycles. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1969 for work carried out under the supervision of Robert Osserman.
In mathematics, spin geometry is the area of differential geometry and topology where objects like spin manifolds and Dirac operators, and the various associated index theorems have come to play a fundamental role both in mathematics and in mathematical physics.
In mathematics, and in particular gauge theory and complex geometry, a Hermitian Yang–Mills connection is a Chern connection associated to an inner product on a holomorphic vector bundle over a Kähler manifold that satisfies an analogue of Einstein's equations: namely, the contraction of the curvature 2-form of the connection with the Kähler form is required to be a constant times the identity transformation. Hermitian Yang–Mills connections are special examples of Yang–Mills connections, and are often called instantons.
In differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and gauge theory, the Kobayashi–Hitchin correspondence relates stable vector bundles over a complex manifold to Einstein–Hermitian vector bundles. The correspondence is named after Shoshichi Kobayashi and Nigel Hitchin, who independently conjectured in the 1980s that the moduli spaces of stable vector bundles and Einstein–Hermitian vector bundles over a complex manifold were essentially the same.
In differential geometry, a Clifford module bundle, a bundle of Clifford modules or just Clifford module is a vector bundle whose fibers are Clifford modules, the representations of Clifford algebras. The canonical example is a spinor bundle. In fact, on a Spin manifold, every Clifford module is obtained by twisting the spinor bundle.
In mathematics, and especially differential geometry, the Quillen metric is a metric on the determinant line bundle of a family of operators. It was introduced by Daniel Quillen for certain elliptic operators over a Riemann surface, and generalized to higher-dimensional manifolds by Jean-Michel Bismut and Dan Freed.
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