Nancy Burgess Hingston is a mathematician working in

differential geometry Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multili ...

. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at The College of New Jersey..

Early life and education

Nancy Hingston's father William Hingston was superintendent of the

Central Bucks School District The Central Bucks School District or CBSD is located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and is the third largest school district in Pennsylvania. The district covers the Boroughs of Chalfont, Doylestown and New Britain and Buckingham To ...

in Pennsylvania; her mother was a high school mathematics and computer science teacher. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and physics. After a year studying physics as a graduate student, she switched to mathematics, and completed her PhD in 1981 from Harvard University under the supervision of Raoul Bott.

Career

Before joining TCNJ, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also been a frequent visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study, and has been involved with the Program for Women and Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study since its founding in 1994.

Contributions

Nancy Hingston made major contributions in Riemannian geometry and Hamiltonian dynamics, and more specifically in the study of closed geodesics and, more generally, periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems. In her very first paper, she proved that a generic Riemannian metric on a closed manifold possesses infinitely many closed geodesics. In the 1990s, she proved that the growth rate of closed geodesics in Riemannian 2-spheres is at least the one of prime numbers. In the years 2000s, she proved the long-standing

Conley conjecture The Conley conjecture, named after mathematician Charles Conley, is a mathematical conjecture in the field of symplectic geometry, a branch of differential geometry. Background Let (M, \omega) be a compact symplectic manifold. A vector field V ...

from symplectic geometry: every Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a standard symplectic torus of any even dimension possesses infinitely many periodic points (the result was subsequently extended by Viktor Ginzburg to more general symplectic manifolds).

Recognition

Nancy Hingston was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014.. She is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to differential geometry and the study of closed geodesics."2017 Class of the Fellows of the AMS
American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2016-11-06.

Personal

Her husband, Jovi Tenev, is a lawyer.. She has three children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hingston, Nancy Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians University of Pennsylvania alumni Harvard University alumni The College of New Jersey faculty Geometers Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 20th-century women mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians 20th-century American women 21st-century American women