Nancy Hingston

Last updated
Nancy Hingston
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Harvard University
Known forGeneric existence of infinitely many closed geodesics
Proof of the Conley conjecture
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Doctoral advisor Raoul Bott

Nancy Burgess Hingston is a mathematician working in differential geometry. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at The College of New Jersey. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Nancy Hingston's father William Hingston was superintendent of the Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania; her mother was a high school mathematics and computer science teacher. [2] She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in mathematics and physics. After a year studying physics as a graduate student, she switched to mathematics, [1] and completed her PhD in 1981 from Harvard University under the supervision of Raoul Bott. [3]

Career

Before joining TCNJ, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania. [2] She has also been a frequent visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study, [1] and has been involved with the Program for Women and Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study since its founding in 1994. [4]

Contributions

Nancy Hingston made major contributions in Riemannian geometry and Hamiltonian dynamics, and more specifically in the study of closed geodesics and, more generally, periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems. In her very first paper, [5] she proved that a generic Riemannian metric on a closed manifold possesses infinitely many closed geodesics. In the 1990s, she proved that the growth rate of closed geodesics in Riemannian 2-spheres is at least the one of prime numbers. [6] In the years 2000s, she proved the long-standing Conley conjecture from symplectic geometry: every Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a standard symplectic torus of any even dimension possesses infinitely many periodic points [7] (the result was subsequently extended by Viktor Ginzburg to more general symplectic manifolds).

Recognition

Nancy Hingston was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014. [8] [9] [10]

She is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to differential geometry and the study of closed geodesics." [11]

Personal

Her husband, Jovi Tenev, is a lawyer. [2] She has three children. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Differential geometry</span> Branch of mathematics dealing with functions and geometric structures on differentiable manifolds

Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilinear algebra. The field has its origins in the study of spherical geometry as far back as antiquity. It also relates to astronomy, the geodesy of the Earth, and later the study of hyperbolic geometry by Lobachevsky. The simplest examples of smooth spaces are the plane and space curves and surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the study of these shapes formed the basis for development of modern differential geometry during the 18th and 19th centuries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geodesic</span> Straight path on a curved surface or a Riemannian manifold

In geometry, a geodesic is a curve representing in some sense the shortest path (arc) between two points in a surface, or more generally in a Riemannian manifold. The term also has meaning in any differentiable manifold with a connection. It is a generalization of the notion of a "straight line".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symplectic geometry</span> Branch of differential geometry and differential topology

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, a symplectomorphism or symplectic map is an isomorphism in the category of symplectic manifolds. In classical mechanics, a symplectomorphism represents a transformation of phase space that is volume-preserving and preserves the symplectic structure of phase space, and is called a canonical transformation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Contact geometry</span> Branch of geometry

In mathematics, contact geometry is the study of a geometric structure on smooth manifolds given by a hyperplane distribution in the tangent bundle satisfying a condition called 'complete non-integrability'. Equivalently, such a distribution may be given as the kernel of a differential one-form, and the non-integrability condition translates into a maximal non-degeneracy condition on the form. These conditions are opposite to two equivalent conditions for 'complete integrability' of a hyperplane distribution, i.e. that it be tangent to a codimension one foliation on the manifold, whose equivalence is the content of the Frobenius theorem.

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.

Hopf–Rinow theorem is a set of statements about the geodesic completeness of Riemannian manifolds. It is named after Heinz Hopf and his student Willi Rinow, who published it in 1931. Stefan Cohn-Vossen extended part of the Hopf–Rinow theorem to the context of certain types of metric spaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mikhael Gromov (mathematician)</span> Russian-French mathematician

Mikhael Leonidovich Gromov is a Russian-French mathematician known for his work in geometry, analysis and group theory. He is a permanent member of Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France and a professor of mathematics at New York University.

In the mathematical field of differential geometry, there are various splitting theorems on when a pseudo-Riemannian manifold can be given as a metric product. The best-known is the Cheeger–Gromoll splitting theorem for Riemannian manifolds, although there has also been research into splitting of Lorentzian manifolds.

In mathematics, the soul theorem is a theorem of Riemannian geometry that largely reduces the study of complete manifolds of non-negative sectional curvature to that of the compact case. Jeff Cheeger and Detlef Gromoll proved the theorem in 1972 by generalizing a 1969 result of Gromoll and Wolfgang Meyer. The related soul conjecture, formulated by Cheeger and Gromoll at that time, was proved twenty years later by Grigori Perelman.

In mathematics, Floer homology is a tool for studying symplectic geometry and low-dimensional topology. Floer homology is a novel invariant that arises as an infinite-dimensional analogue of finite-dimensional Morse homology. Andreas Floer introduced the first version of Floer homology, now called Lagrangian Floer homology, in his proof of the Arnold conjecture in symplectic geometry. Floer also developed a closely related theory for Lagrangian submanifolds of a symplectic manifold. A third construction, also due to Floer, associates homology groups to closed three-dimensional manifolds using the Yang–Mills functional. These constructions and their descendants play a fundamental role in current investigations into the topology of symplectic and contact manifolds as well as (smooth) three- and four-dimensional manifolds.

In mathematics, the Weinstein conjecture refers to a general existence problem for periodic orbits of Hamiltonian or Reeb vector flows. More specifically, the conjecture claims that on a compact contact manifold, its Reeb vector field should carry at least one periodic orbit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Weinstein</span> American mathematician

Alan David Weinstein is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, working in the field of differential geometry, and especially in Poisson geometry.

The Geometry Festival is an annual mathematics conference held in the United States.

In differential geometry and dynamical systems, a closed geodesic on a Riemannian manifold is a geodesic that returns to its starting point with the same tangent direction. It may be formalized as the projection of a closed orbit of the geodesic flow on the tangent space of the manifold.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn S. Gordon</span> American mathematician

Carolyn S. Gordon is a mathematician and Benjamin Cheney Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. She is most well known for giving a negative answer to the question "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" in her work with David Webb and Scott A. Wolpert. She is a Chauvenet Prize winner and a 2010 Noether Lecturer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helmut Hofer</span> German-American mathematician

Helmut Hermann W. Hofer is a German-American mathematician, one of the founders of the area of symplectic topology.

In differential geometry the theorem of the three geodesics, also known as Lyusternik–Schnirelmann theorem, states that every Riemannian manifold with the topology of a sphere has at least three simple closed geodesics. The result can also be extended to quasigeodesics on a convex polyhedron, and to closed geodesics of reversible Finsler 2-spheres. The theorem is sharp: although every Riemannian 2-sphere contains infinitely many distinct closed geodesics, only three of them are guaranteed to have no self-intersections. For example, by a result of Morse if the lengths of three principal axes of an ellipsoid are distinct, but sufficiently close to each other, then the ellipsoid has only three simple closed geodesics.

The Conley conjecture, named after mathematician Charles Conley, is a mathematical conjecture in the field of symplectic geometry, a branch of differential geometry.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Dr. Nancy Hingston", Women in Science: Profiles of Selected TCNJ Women Faculty and Alumni, School of Science, The College of New Jersey , retrieved 2015-10-25.
  2. 1 2 3 "Jovi Tenev Weds Nancy Hingston", Style, The New York Times , August 23, 1981.
  3. Nancy Hingston at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. Plump, Wendy (May 29, 2012), "Mentoring young women is integral to institute's math program", Times of Trenton .
  5. Hingston, Nancy (1984), "Equivariant Morse theory and closed geodesics", Journal of Differential Geometry , 19 (1): 85–116, doi: 10.4310/jdg/1214438424
  6. Hingston, Nancy (1993), "On the growth of the number of closed geodesics on the two-sphere", International Mathematics Research Notices , 1993 (9): 253–262, doi: 10.1155/S1073792893000285
  7. Hingston, Nancy (2009), "Subharmonic solutions of Hamiltonian equations on tori", Annals of Mathematics , 170 (2): 529–560, doi: 10.4007/annals.2009.170.529
  8. ICM Plenary and Invited Speakers since 1897, International Mathematical Union , retrieved 2015-10-01.
  9. 1 2 Patterson, Mary Jo (May 26, 2014), "On Stage in Seoul", TCJN News, The College of New Jersey , retrieved 2015-10-25.
  10. Hingston, Nancy. "Loop products, Poincaré duality, index growth and dynamics". Proceedings of the ICM, Seoul 2014. Vol. 2. pp. 881–896.
  11. 2017 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2016-11-06.