Doris Fischer-Colbrie is a

ceramic art Ceramic art is art made from ceramic materials, including clay. It may take forms including artistic pottery, including tableware, tiles, figurines and other sculpture. As one of the plastic arts, ceramic art is one of the visual arts. ...

ist and former

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1978 from University of California at Berkeley, where her advisor was

H. Blaine Lawson 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 fro ...

. Many of her contributions to the theory of

minimal surfaces In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature (see definitions below). The term "minimal surface" is used because these surfaces originally arose as surfaces tha ...

are now considered foundational to the field. In particular, her collaboration with

Richard Schoen Richard Melvin Schoen (born October 23, 1950) is an American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He is best known for the resolution of the Yamabe problem in 1984. Career Born in Celina, Ohio, and a ...

is a landmark contribution to the interaction of stable minimal surfaces with nonnegative

scalar curvature In the mathematical field of Riemannian geometry, the scalar curvature (or the Ricci scalar) 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 geometr ...

. A particular result, also obtained by

Manfredo do Carmo Manfredo Perdigão do Carmo (15 August 1928, Maceió – 30 April 2018, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian mathematician. He spent most of his career at IMPA and is seen as the doyen of differential geometry in Brazil. Education and career Do Car ...

and Chiakuei Peng, is that the only complete stable minimal surfaces in are planes. Her work on unstable minimal surfaces gave the basic tools by which to relate the assumption of finite index to conditions on stable subdomains and total curvature. After positions at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

and

San Diego State University San Diego State University (SDSU) is a public research university in San Diego, California. Founded in 1897 as San Diego Normal School, it is the third-oldest university and southernmost in the 23-member California State University (CSU) system ...

, Fischer-Colbrie left academia to become a ceramic artist. She is married to Schoen, with whom she has two children.''The mathematics of Richard Schoen.'' Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 65 (2018), no. 11, 1349–1376.

Publication list

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fischer-Colbrie, Doris Helga 20th-century women mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians Columbia University faculty San Diego State University faculty American women artists American women academics