Izabella Łaba (born 1966) is a Polish-Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

. Her main research specialties are harmonic analysis,

geometric measure theory In mathematics, geometric measure theory (GMT) is the study of geometric properties of sets (typically in Euclidean space) through measure theory. It allows mathematicians to extend tools from differential geometry to a much larger class of surfa ...

, and

additive combinatorics Additive combinatorics is an area of combinatorics in mathematics. One major area of study in additive combinatorics are ''inverse problems'': given the size of the sumset ''A'' + ''B'' is small, what can we say about the structures of A ...

Professional career

Łaba earned a master's degree in 1986 from the

University of Wrocław , ''Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau'' (before 1945) , free_label = Specialty programs , free = , colors = Blue , website uni.wroc.pl The University of Wrocław ( pl, Uniwersytet Wrocławski, U ...

. She received her PhD from the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...

in 1994, under the supervision of

Israel Michael Sigal Israel Michael Sigal (born 31 August 1945 in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR) is a Canadian mathematician specializing in mathematical physics. He is a professor at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics. He was an invited speaker at Internat ...

, after which she was a postdoctoral scholar at

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...

and then an assistant professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

before moving to UBC in 2000. She is one of three founding editors of the ''Online Journal of Analytic Combinatorics''.

Contributions

Łaba's thesis research proved the asymptotic completeness of many n-body systems in the presence of a constant magnetic field. While at UCLA, with

Nets Katz Nets Hawk Katz is the IBM Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He was a professor of Mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington until March 2013. Katz earned a B.A. in mathematics from Rice University in 1990 at t ...

and Terence Tao, she made important contributions to the theory of

Kakeya set In mathematics, a Kakeya set, or Besicovitch set, is a set of points in Euclidean space which contains a unit line segment in every direction. For instance, a disk of radius 1/2 in the Euclidean plane, or a ball of radius 1/2 in three-dimensional ...

s, including the best known

lower bound In mathematics, particularly in order theory, an upper bound or majorant of a subset of some preordered set is an element of that is greater than or equal to every element of . Dually, a lower bound or minorant of is defined to be an eleme ...

on these sets in three-dimensional Euclidean spaces. Her more recent work concerns harmonic analysis, periodic tilings, and Falconer's conjecture on sets of distances of points.

Awards and honours

Łaba was the 2004 winner of the Coxeter–James Prize, an annual prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society for outstanding young mathematicians.CMS 2004 Coxeter-James Prize: Dr. Izabella Łaba (University of British Columbia)
Canadian Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-01-28. In 2008, the CMS honoured her again with their

Krieger–Nelson Prize The Krieger–Nelson Prize is presented by the Canadian Mathematical Society in recognition of an outstanding woman in mathematics. It was first awarded in 1995. The award is named after Cecilia Krieger and Evelyn Nelson, both known for their contri ...

, given to an outstanding woman in mathematics.CMS 2008 Krieger-Nelson Prize: Dr. Izabella Łaba (University of British Columbia)
retrieved 2013-01-28. In 2012 she became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-01-27.

References

External links

Home pageThe Accidental Mathematician
Łaba's blog {{DEFAULTSORT:Laba, Izabella 1966 births Living people Canadian mathematicians Canadian women mathematicians Polish women mathematicians 20th-century Polish mathematicians 21st-century Polish mathematicians University of Wrocław alumni University of Toronto alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty Princeton University faculty Academic staff of the University of British Columbia Fellows of the American Mathematical Society