Sema Salur is a Turkish-American mathematician, currently serving as a Professor of Mathematics at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants Undergraduate education, undergraduate and graduate degrees, including Doctorate, do ...

. She was awarded the

Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize The Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize is an annual prize in mathematics, awarded by the Association for Women in Mathematics to honor outstanding research by a female mathematician who has recently earned tenure. The prize funds the winner to spend a ...

for 2014–2015, a prize intended to give a recently promoted associate professor a year-long fellowship 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 tea ...

; and has been the recipient of a

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 ...

Research Award beginning in 2017. She specialises in the "geometry and topology of the moduli spaces of calibrated submanifolds inside Calabi–Yau, G₂ and Spin(7)

manifolds 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 ne ...

", which are important to certain aspects of string theory and

M-theory M-theory is a theory in physics that unifies all consistent versions of superstring theory. Edward Witten first conjectured the existence of such a theory at a string theory conference at the University of Southern California in 1995. Witten's ...

in physics, theories that attempt to unite

gravity In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the stro ...

electromagnetism In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions of ...

, and the strong and

weak nuclear force In nuclear physics and particle physics, the weak interaction, which is also often called the weak force or weak nuclear force, is one of the four known fundamental interactions, with the others being electromagnetism, the strong interaction ...

s into one coherent

Theory of Everything A theory of everything (TOE or TOE/ToE), final theory, ultimate theory, unified field theory or master theory is a hypothetical, singular, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all asp ...

Education

* 1993: B.S. in Mathematics,

Boğaziçi University Boğaziçi University ( tr, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi), also known as Bosphorus University, is a major research university in Istanbul, Turkey. Its main campus is located on the European side of the Bosphorus strait. It has six faculties and tw ...

, Turkey. * 2000: PhD in Mathematics, Michigan State University

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Salur, Sema Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American mathematicians American academics of Turkish descent American women mathematicians Turkish mathematicians Turkish women scientists Boğaziçi University alumni Michigan State University alumni University of Rochester faculty 21st-century women mathematicians 21st-century American women