Where was Karen Uhlenbeck educated from 1964 to 1965?
Karen Uhlenbeck Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ( born August 24 , 1942 ) is an American mathematician and a founder of modern geometric analysis . She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin , where she held the Sid W . Richardson Foundation Regents Chair . She is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University . Uhlenbeck was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007 . She won the 2019 Abel Prize for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations , gauge theory , and integrable systems , and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis , geometry and mathematical physics . She is the first woman to win the prize since its inception in 2003 . Life and career . Uhlenbeck was born in Cleveland , Ohio , to engineer Arnold Keskulla and schoolteacher and artist Carolyn Windeler Keskulla . While she was a child , the family moved to New Jersey . Uhlenbecks maiden name , Keskulla , comes from Keskküla and from her grandfather who was Estonian . Uhlenbeck received her B.A . ( 1964 ) from the University of Michigan . She began her graduate studies at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University , and married biophysicist Olke C . Uhlenbeck ( the son of physicist George Uhlenbeck ) in 1965 . When her husband went to Harvard , she moved with him and restarted her studies at Brandeis University , where she earned an M.A . ( 1966 ) and Ph.D . ( 1968 ) under the supervision of Richard Palais . Her doctoral dissertation was titled The Calculus of Variations and Global Analysis . After temporary jobs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California , Berkeley , and having difficulty finding a permanent position with her husband because of the anti-nepotism rules then in place that prevented hiring both a husband and wife even in distinct departments of a university , she took a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1971 . However , she disliked Urbana and moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976 as well as separating from her first husband Olke Uhlenbeck in the same year . She moved again to the University of Chicago in 1983 . In 1988 , by which time she had married mathematician Robert F . Williams , she moved to the University of Texas at Austin as the Sid W . Richardson Foundation Regents Chairholder . Uhlenbeck is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin , a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University . Research . Uhlenbeck is one of the founders of the field of geometric analysis , a discipline that uses differential geometry to study the solutions to differential equations and vice versa . She has also contributed to topological quantum field theory and integrable systems . Together with Jonathan Sacks in the early 1980s , Uhlenbeck established regularity estimates that have found applications to studies of the singularities of harmonic maps and the existence of smooth local solutions to the Yang–Mills–Higgs equations in gauge theory . In particular , Donaldson describes their joint 1981 paper The existence of minimal immersions of 2-spheres as a landmark paper.. . which showed that , with a deeper analysis , variational arguments can still be used to give general existence results for harmonic map equations . Building on these ideas , Uhlenbeck initiated a systematic study of the moduli theory of minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds ( also called minimal submanifold theory ) in her 1983 paper , Closed minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds . In particular , her work is described by Simon Donaldson in a survey of Yang–Mills geometry as foundational in the analytic aspects of the calculus of variations associated with the Yang–Mills functional . A wider survey of her contributions to the field of calculus of variations was published by Simon Donaldson in the March 2019 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society ; Donaldson describes the work of Uhlenbeck , along with Shing-Tung Yau , Richard Schoen and several others , as developing a.. . Outreach . In 1991 , Uhlenbeck co-founded , with Herbert Clemens and Dan Freed , the Park City Mathematics Institute ( PCMI ) with the mission to provide an immersive educational and professional development opportunity for several parallel communities from across the larger umbrella of the mathematics profession . Uhlenbeck also co-founded the Women and Mathematics Program at the Institute for Advanced Study with the mission to recruit and retain more women in mathematics . British theoretical physicist and author Jim Al-Khalili describes Uhlenbeck as a role model for her work in promoting a career in mathematics to young people , particularly women . Personal life . Uhlenbeck is a self-described messy reader and messy thinker , with boxes of books stacked on her desk at Princetons Institute for Advanced Study . In spontaneous remarks made to Institute colleagues after winning the Abel Prize in March 2019 , Uhlenbeck noted that for lack of prominent female role models during her apprenticeship in the field of mathematics , she had instead emulated chef Julia Child : She knew how to pick the turkey up off the floor and serve it . Awards and honors . In March 2019 , Uhlenbeck became the first woman to receive the Abel Prize , with the award committee citing the decision for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations , gauge theory and integrable systems , and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis , geometry and mathematical physics . Hans Munthe-Kaas , who chairs the award committee , stated that Her theories have revolutionised our understanding of minimal surfaces , such as more general minimisation problems in higher dimensions . Uhlenbeck also won the National Medal of Science in 2000 , and the Leroy P . Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research of the American Mathematical Society in 2007 , for her foundational contributions in analytic aspects of mathematical gauge theory , based on her 1982 papers Removable singularities in Yang–Mills fields and Connections with bounds on curvature . She became a MacArthur Fellow in 1983 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985 . She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 . She became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001 , an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society in 2008 , and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 . The Association for Women in Mathematics included her in the 2020 class of AWM Fellows for her groundbreaking and profound contributions to modern geometric analysis ; for establishing a career as one of the greatest mathematicians of our time , despite the considerable challenges facing women when she entered the field ; for using her experiences navigating these challenges to create and sustain programs to address them for future generations of women . For a lifetime of breaking barriers ; and for being the first woman to win the Abel Prize . She was the Noether Lecturer of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1988 . In 1990 , she was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians , as only the second woman ( after Emmy Noether ) to give such a lecture . Her other awards include the University of Michigan alumna of the year ( 1984 ) , the Sigma Xi Common Wealth Award for Science and Technology ( 1995 ) , and honorary doctorates from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign ( 2000 ) , Ohio State University ( 2001 ) , University of Michigan ( 2004 ) , Harvard University ( 2007 ) , and Princeton University ( 2012 ) .