Emmy Murphy is an American mathematician and a professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

who works in the area of symplectic topology,

contact geometry In mathematics, contact geometry is the study of a geometric structure on smooth manifolds given by a hyperplane distribution (differential geometry), distribution in the tangent bundle satisfying a condition called 'complete non-integrability'. ...

and

geometric topology In mathematics, geometric topology is the study of manifolds and maps between them, particularly embeddings of one manifold into another. History Geometric topology as an area distinct from algebraic topology may be said to have originated i ...

Education

Murphy graduated from the

University of Nevada, Reno The University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada, the University of Nevada, or UNR) is a public land-grant research university in Reno, Nevada. It is the state's flagship public university and primary land grant institution. It was founded on October 12, ...

in 2007, the first in her family to earn a college degree. She completed her doctorate at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 2012; her dissertation, ''Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds'', was supervised by

Yakov Eliashberg Yakov Matveevich Eliashberg (also Yasha Eliashberg; russian: link=no, Яков Матвеевич Элиашберг; born 11 December 1946) is an American mathematician who was born in Leningrad, USSR. Education and career Eliashberg receiv ...

Career

She was a

C. L. E. Moore instructor The job title of C. L. E. Moore instructor is given by the Math Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to recent math Ph.D.s hired for their promise in pure mathematics research. The instructors are expected to do both teaching and rese ...

and assistant professor at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

before moving in 2016 to

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

, where she became an associate professor of mathematics. She moved to

in 2021 as a full professor. Murphy is recognized for her contribution to symplectic and

. She won the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize iin 2020 for "the introduction of notions of loose Legendrian submanifolds", and "overtwisted contact structures in higher dimensions", which is joint work with Matthew Strom Borman and Yakov Eliashberg. Murphy was invited to the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in 2018 and she gave a talk related to some results on

h-principle In mathematics, the homotopy principle (or h-principle) is a very general way to solve partial differential equations (PDEs), and more generally partial differential relations (PDRs). The h-principle is good for underdetermined PDEs or PDRs, su ...

phenomena. Apart from using

to study the flexibility of local geometric models, Murphy's work uses cut-and-paste/surgery techniques from

smooth topology In algebraic geometry, the smooth topology is a certain Grothendieck topology, which is finer than étale topology. Its main use is to define the cohomology of an algebraic stack with coefficients in, say, the étale sheaf \mathbb_l. To understand ...

. She also works on exploring the interaction of symplectic/contact topology with geometric invariants, such as those coming from pseudo-holomorphic curves or constructible sheaves. Murphy received the grants from

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

for the period 2019–2022 on the topic "Flexible Stein Manifolds and Fukaya Categories".

Awards and honors

* Von Neumann Fellow,

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

, 2019–2020. * New Horizons in Mathematics prize awarded by the

Breakthrough Prize The Breakthrough Prizes are a set of international awards bestowed in three categories by the Breakthrough Prize Board in recognition of scientific advances. The awards are part of several "Breakthrough" initiatives founded and funded by Yuri Mi ...

Foundation 2020. * Invited speaker at the 2018

. * Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize 2017 by the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

. * AWM Birman Prize 2016 by Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. * Sloan Research Fellowship 2015.

References

External links

*
Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds
' {{DEFAULTSORT:Murphy, Emmy Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians University of Nevada, Reno alumni Stanford University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Northwestern University faculty 21st-century women mathematicians 21st-century American women