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

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

. Her main research specialties are

harmonic analysis Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with investigating the connections between a function and its representation in frequency. The frequency representation is found by using the Fourier transform for functions on unbounded do ...

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 surfac ...

, and additive combinatorics.

Professional career

Łaba earned a master's degree in 1986 from the

University of Wrocław The University of Wrocław (, UWr; ) is a public research university in Wrocław, Poland. It is the largest institution of higher learning in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship, with over 100,000 graduates since 1945, including some 1,900 researcher ...

. 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 whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

in 1994, under the supervision of Israel Michael Sigal, after which she was a postdoctoral scholar at

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

and then an assistant professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

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 and Terence Tao, she made important contributions to the theory of Kakeya sets, including the best known lower bound on these sets in three-dimensional Euclidean spaces. Her more recent work concerns

, 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 The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS; French: ''Société mathématique du Canada'') is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to advancing mathematical research, outreach, scholarship and education in Canada. The Society se ...

for outstanding young mathematicians.CMS 2004 Coxeter-James Prize: Dr. Izabella Łaba (University of British Columbia)

, retrieved 2013-01-28. In 2008, the CMS honoured her again with their Krieger–Nelson Prize, 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