Kathryn Mann is a mathematician who has won the Rudin Award, Birman Prize, Duszenko Award, and

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

for her research in

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 ...

and geometric group theory. She is an assistant professor of mathematics at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

Education and career

Mann graduated from the

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

in 2008, with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 2014. Her dissertation, ''Components of Representation Spaces'', was supervised by Benson Farb. Mann was a Morrey Visiting Assistant Professor and

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 ...

funded postdoctoral researcher at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

from 2014 to 2016, postdoctoral researcher at the

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute The Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), is an independent nonprofit mathematical research institution on the University of California campus in Berkeley, Califo ...

in 2015, a visiting professor at

Pierre and Marie Curie University Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public university, public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussi ...

in 2016, and Manning Assistant Professor of Mathematics at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

from 2017 to 2019. She moved to

as an assistant professor in 2019.

Research

Mann's research involves the

symmetries Symmetry (from grc, συμμετρία "agreement in dimensions, due proportion, arrangement") in everyday language refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. In mathematics, "symmetry" has a more precise definiti ...

manifold In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a n ...

s. She has made significant progress on a problem posed by

Étienne Ghys Étienne Ghys (born 29 December 1954) is a French mathematician. His research focuses mainly on geometry and dynamical systems, though his mathematical interests are broad. He also expresses much interest in the historical development of mathema ...

: when the symmetries of one manifold act nontrivially on a second manifold, must the first manifold have smaller or equal dimension to the second one? She has also studied the rigidity of groups of symmetries of surfaces.

Recognition

In 2016, Mann won the Mary Ellen Rudin Award for "her deep and extensive work on homeomorphism groups of manifolds". 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 ...

gave Mann their 2019

Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry The Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry is a prize given every other year by the Association for Women in Mathematics to an outstanding young female researcher in topology or geometry. The prize fund for the award was endow ...

, for "major breakthroughs in the theory of dynamics of group actions on manifolds". Also in 2019, the Wrocław Mathematicians Foundation gave Mann the Kamil Duszenko Award. Mann has also been funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and by a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Selected publications

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mann, Kathryn Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Women mathematicians Topologists University of Toronto alumni University of Chicago alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Brown University faculty Cornell University faculty Sloan Research Fellows