Sherry Gong

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Sherry Gong is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology and known as one of the most successful female competitors at the International Mathematical Olympiad. To date, she is the only U.S. woman who has won medals in both the International Mathematical Olympiad and the International Physics Olympiad. She is currently an assistant professor at Texas A&M University.

Contents

Early life and education

Gong was born in New York City to two mathematicians, [1] Guihua Gong and Liangqing Li, both later affiliated with the University of Puerto Rico. She grew up in Toronto, Puerto Rico, and New Hampshire. [2]

She received an AB in mathematics from Harvard College (2011), and a PhD in mathematics from MIT (2018). Her dissertation, Results on Spectral Sequences for Monopole and Singular Instanton Floer Homologies, was supervised by Tomasz Mrowka. [3]

Mathematics Olympiad competitions

In 2001, she participated La Olimpiada Matemática de Centro América y el Caribe (OMCC). She won a silver medal and a special prize for the most original solution. [4] She was a sixth grader and 12 years old at the time, competing on the Puerto Rican team. [5]

Gong participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) five times. [6] In 2002-2004, she represented Puerto Rico. In 2002, she was the youngest participant at 14 years old. [7] In 2003, she won a bronze medal, which was Puerto Rico's first medal [8] in the IMO. In 2004, she won a silver medal. In 2005 and 2007, she represented U.S. in the IMO, becoming only the third girl to make the U.S. team as of 2010, [9] following Melanie Wood (1998, 1999) and Alison Miller (2004). [10] She won a silver medal in 2005 and was named the 2005 Clay Olympiad Scholar. [2] In 2007, Gong became the second U.S. girl, following Alison Miller in 2004, [11] to win a gold medal at the IMO, [12] [13] tying for seventh place with a score of 32. [6] She was the only girl on the U.S. team that year. [14]

She placed in the top twelve at the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad [15] in 2005, 2006, and 2007, including placing 2nd in 2007. In 2007, she tied for first place in the China Mathematical Olympiad for Girls. [2] [10] [16]

International Physics Olympiad

In 2006 she earned a silver medal at the 2006 International Physics Olympiad, [17] representing the United States.

Math Olympiad coaching

In 2010 Gong helped coach [18] the U.S. team that competed in the China Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad; five team members won gold medals.

In 2012-2017, she was the deputy leader or leader [19] of the U.S. team in the European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad.

In 2022, she co-founded the G2 Math program. [20] This is a free summer camp for females and non-binary high school students to come together to learn olympiad math. [21] She is a co-director and instructor of the program.

Career

After completing her doctorate, Gong did postdoctoral research as a Hedrick assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, [22] [23] and as a Maryam Mirzakhani postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She is currently an assistant professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University. Her research areas are low dimensional topology via gauge theory and noncommutative geometry.

In the field of low dimensional topology, she gave the first non-trivial computation of Kronheimer and Mrowka's -invariant, and showed that it was not equal to Rasmussen's s invariant, reviving the Freedman-Gompf-Morrison-Walker approach to the smooth 4-dimensional Poincare conjecture. [24] [25] She further showed that is not additive for connected sums of knots.[ citation needed ]

In the field of noncommutative geometry, she confirmed that the Novikov conjecture holds true for discrete subgroups of the diffeomorphism group of a closed smooth manifold. [26] [27]

Honors

In 2011, while a student at Harvard, Gong won the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman. [1] [28] [29]

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References

  1. 1 2 Timmerman, Michelle B. (December 10, 2010). "Sherry Gong". The Harvard Crimson.
  2. 1 2 3 "Sherry Gong named Clay Olympiad Scholar". Clay Mathematics Institute. June 27, 2005. Archived from the original on 2012-05-11.
  3. ↑ Gong, Sherry (2018). Results on spectral sequences for monopole and singular instanton Floer homologies (PhD thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/117864. OCLC   1051189959.
  4. ↑ Heber Nieto, Jos ́e (2001). "Las Olimp ́ıadas Matema ́ticas de Centroam ́erica y el Caribe" (PDF). Boletin de la Asociacion Matematica Venezolana (Bulletin of the Venezuelan Mathematical Association). VIII (1).
  5. ↑ Bliss, Peggy Ann (August 5, 2001). "Local student, 12, stuns experts with win at Math Olympics". The San Juan Star.
  6. 1 2 "Sherry Gong's IMO record". International Mathematical Olympiad.
  7. ↑ McGuire, Annie; Collins, Donald (24 July 2002). "Mind-boggling games as the whiz-kids limber up for Glasgow Maths Olympiad". The Herald. ProQuest   332893451.
  8. ↑ "Puerto Rico". www.imo-official.org. International Math Olympiad . Retrieved 2024-09-02.
  9. ↑ Ellison, Glenn; Swanson, Ashley (Spring 2010). "The Gender Gap in Secondary School Mathematics at High Achievement Levels: Evidence from the American Mathematics Competitions" (PDF). The Journal of Economic Perspectives . 24 (2): 109–128. doi:10.1257/jep.24.2.109. JSTOR   25703503. (see p. 121)
  10. 1 2 Desai, Meera (13 March 2019). "IMO medalists & their contributions". Maa.org. Mathematical Association of America.
  11. ↑ Whitney, A.K. (18 April 2016). "Math for Girls, Math for Boys". The Atlantic .
  12. ↑ Rimer, Sara (10 October 2008). "Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds". The New York Times .
  13. ↑ "美国华裔女孩5次参加国际数学奥赛3次拿奖". news.sohu.com, 2007-08-12.
  14. ↑ "2007 International Mathematical Olympiad" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society . Vol. 54, no. 10. American Mathematical Society. November 2007. pp. 1347–1348.
  15. ↑ "USA Mathematical Olympiad: Awards Ceremony Honors 2007 Winners". Mathematical Association of America. Archived from the original on 2010-04-23.
  16. ↑ "Rising Stars". Science . 317 (5842): 1153. 31 August 2007. doi:10.1126/science.317.5842.1153c.
  17. ↑ "American Physical Society website, article title "37th International Physics Olympiad U.S. Physics_Team Wins Golds/Silver"". American Association of Physics Teachers.
  18. ↑ "U.S. team in 2010 CMO". American Mathematical Society.
  19. ↑ "Sherry Gong in EGMO". European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad . Retrieved 2024-09-02.
  20. ↑ "G2 Math Program" . Retrieved 2024-09-02.
  21. ↑ "CMU Recently Hosted Math Camp For High School Girls". www.news-gazette.com. WKIO (FM). 10 February 2022.
  22. ↑ "Sherry Gong". UCLA Mathematics. Archived from the original on 2018-10-13. Retrieved 2018-10-28.
  23. ↑ "Lunch with Sherry Gong". University of Virginia. 2019-09-04.
  24. ↑ Kronheimer, P. B.; Mrowka, T. S. (2013). "Gauge theory and Rasmussen's invariant". Journal of Topology. 6 (3): 659–674. arXiv: 1110.1297 . doi:10.1112/jtopol/jtt008.
  25. ↑ Gong, Sherry (2021). "On the Kronheimer–Mrowka concordance invariant". Journal of Topology. 14. Journal of Topology, 2021 14(1):1- 28, doi.org/10.1112/topo.12175: 1–28. arXiv: 1908.05018 . doi:10.1112/topo.12175.
  26. ↑ Gong, Sherry; Wu, Jianchao; Yu, Guoliang (2021). "The Novikov conjecture, the group of volume preserving diffeomorphisms and Hilbert-Hadamard spaces". Geometric and Functional Analysis. 31 (2). Geom. Funct. Anal. 31, 206-267 (2021). doi.org/10.1007/s00039-021-00563-7: 206–267. doi:10.1007/s00039-021-00563-7.
  27. ↑ Gong, Sherry; Wu, Jianchao; Xie, Zhizhang; Yu, Guoliang (2023). "The Novikov conjecture, the group of diffeomorphisms and continuous fields of Hilbert-Hadamard spaces". arXiv: 2310.01219 [math.KT].
  28. ↑ "Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman 2011 | AWM is pleased to present the twenty-first annual Alice T. Schafer Prize to Sherry Gong, Harvard University". awm-math.org. Association for Women in Mathematics . Retrieved 2024-08-29.
  29. ↑ "Math In The News | Sherry Gong Receives 2011 Alice T. Schafer Prize". Mathdl.maa.org. Mathematical Association of America. 2011-01-14. Archived from the original on 2012-03-08.
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